Ten Easy Steps to Learn About a Place with Google Earth

... from the Google Earth Blog.

MedWorm

 MedWorm says it collects medical information from more than 4,000 "authoritative data sources" via RSS, combines them, categorizes them and redistributes them in new feeds you can subscribe to for free. It was built by an IT engineer in the UK:

"I had been using RSS in the technology sector for my own personal use for some time when I began to realise that it could be of great benefit to some members of my family who are doctors. Since medical professionals are constantly in need of the latest information on medical research and the best methods of treatment, and are also usually overworked with little time to spare, RSS seemed ideal since it could provide the very latest information that is both concise and highly relevant to a specific area of expertise.

I set up MedWorm as a way of using my IT skills to give something back to society, having grown somewhat disheartened of making rich people richer working for big corporate companies. I believe that as more physicians, health care workers and those in medical research start to make use of RSS, medicine will see huge leaps forward as the flow of the right information getting to the right people vastly improves. It can also be instrumental in providing patients with the additional information they are rightly hungry for when faced with illness. I am very excited about how MedWorm can contribute to this process."

Survival Guide to Online Social Networking

A recent issue of the FreePint newsletter offered a "Survival Guide" to online social networking. From an editorial by Monique Cuvelier:

It was just over a decade ago that I was a young journalist working at the business desk of a newspaper. Looking back on it now, I can't fathom how I managed. If I needed to find sources for an article, I might leaf through notes I'd jotted on who might be useful in an upcoming piece. If I didn't find anyone, I'd ask my desk mates if they knew anyone. Then I might call a few associations to see if they could recommend anyone. Then I called directory enquiries - who knew me by voice - and asked for a phone number that matched a likely name I'd seen or heard somewhere else. I contacted them out of the blue and hoped they would be amenable to an interview.

It was an enormously labour-intensive way of increasing my personal network, and it involved notes, press cuttings, chatting with my associates and many, many phone calls. But that's the way everybody did it. Networks lived in brainspace and address books.

Much can happen in the space of 11 years. Now I spend my days alone in my office and thousands of miles away from the rest of FreePint's staff and our many contributors. If I want to find someone, I send an email or look at an online database or comb through my LinkedIn network to see who I can find. I know, or can potentially know, so many more people than I ever have in my life, and it makes reporting a different game altogether.

Social Research Update

... is published quarterly by the Department of Sociology at the UK's University of Surrey. Previous issues include articles on "Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing," "Telephone interviewing," "Visual research methods," and "Using e-mail as a research tool."

Search federal spending data back to 1979

... using the new, free FFATA Portal. A spokesman for Global Computer Enterprises, Inc., the private company that created the site, told Federal Computer Week that "the goal of the search portal is to make the information easy to find by taking out the government jargon." The site explains:

The portal offers free, instant access to contracts and grants awarded across the federal government via a user-friendly free text search and dynamic reporting tool. No login or registration is required – the public has instant access to federal spending information and the ability to create custom reports from that information. This site is not associated with any government agency and is provided free of charge from GCE.

By providing more transparency in government, this site is the easy way to track federal spending and your tax dollars at work. Users are able to search government contracts, grants data, and earmark grants from the appropriations process.

OMB Watch is another private entity that offers a federal spending database.

EarmarkWatch.org

 

... is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and Taxpayers for Common Sense. Here's how the Sunlight Foundation introduced it:

Using EarmarkWatch.org, you can exercise citizen oversight of Congress. Dig into the 47 earmarks worth $166,500,000 that Rep. John Murtha inserted (and figure out which benefit campaign contributors). Or take a close look at the $100,000 earmark that Sen. David Vitter secured for an organization that promotes creationism in Louisiana schools. Or the $37 million in earmarks that include defense giant Northrop Grumman as a beneficiary.

Right now, you can investigate earmarks from the House Defense Appropriations Bill and the House and Senate versions of the Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations bills. Using a host of online resources, you can find out whether recipients of earmarks hired lobbyists, made campaign contributions to members of Congress, or won federal contracts and grants. You can also add information to eamarks others have researched, or comment on what others have found. EarmarkWatch.org provides you with powerful tools to scrutinize and evaluate thousands of earmarks. To get started, create an account and pick an earmark.

WikiFOIA

One of WikiFOIA's goals is "to build a comprehensive and collaborative How To Guide to provide very practical information about open records requests at the state and local level."

Features include:

• A primer for novices
• Sunshine Troublemaker of the Week
• Interviews with Sunshine Activists
• Hot button issues

There's a page for each state, which include links to open records laws, contacts, stories about local freedom of information battles, and blogs, web sites and other state resources related to open records. Here's Kentucky's page, and the page for Indiana. If you find any of the information inadequate, it's your fault, because you can contribute, and you're encouraged to adopt your state.

The founder, Leslie Graves, who goes by the online name "Maverick," works for a Wisconsin non-profit called the Lucy Burns Institute.

Video in Plain English

... from CommonCraft. These are videos that explain such esoterica as social bookmarking, RSS and wikis:

Our goal is to fight complexity with simple tools and plain language. We call our format "paperworks" and publish a new video about once a month.

Google used them this week to introduce their new presentation software. Jon Udell, meanwhile, has written an appreciation.

Transcripts of Federal Court Proceedings Nationwide To Be Available Online

As a former federal courts reporter I would be quite pleased about this if they weren't going to charge an unjustifiable 8 cents a page tax for the privilege. Remember these are electronic files, for which the marginal cost of reproduction is zero:

The Judicial Conference of the United States today voted to make transcripts of federal district and bankruptcy court proceedings available online through the Judiciary's Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system.

Under the new policy, transcripts created by court reporters or transcribers will be available for inspection and copying in a clerk of court’s office and for download from PACER 90 days after they are delivered to the clerk. Individuals will be able to view, download, or print a copy of a transcript from PACER for eight cents per page.

During the initial 90-day period, transcripts will be available at the clerk’s office for inspection only, or may be purchased from the court reporter or transcriber.

Score one for the unaccountable judiciary and its policy of denying the poor equal access to the courts.

Law Library of Congress

The Law Library of Congress has updated its Web site. Its online features include:

GLIN: Global Legal Information Network

International legal database with official full texts of published documents in the original languages.

Guide to Law Online

Annotated guide to online sources of legal information on government and law by U.S. state, country, or region.

Multinational Collections Database

Sources that reprint the laws and regulations of international jurisdictions on specific legal topics.

Global Legal Monitor

Timely news on legal developments from around the world.

Congressional Hearings

Full-text access to historical Congressional committee hearings on a variety of topics.

Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation

Collection of U.S. Congressional documents and debates (1774-1875), including laws, journals, and letters of the Founding Fathers.

Into the Wonkosphere

... as reviewed by Spencer Critchley at ONLamp:

It’s early days, but just like the record industry, American democracy is being taken apart and rebuilt by digital technology and the web. Why should ONLamp readers care? Many of you will be designing and building our new democracy.

Several trends are converging to make this possible and, I think, inevitable. All are characterized by the loss of centralized control to open and/or free systems. These include the rise of open political platforms, such as moveon.org, as an alternative to parties; and the disintermediation of news coverage via blogs, YouTube and citizen journalism. Lately I’ve been following the rise of a third trend: alternative ways of tracking candidates’ reputations. The latest example of that: Wonkosphere.

Wonkosphere uses patented technology licensed from the University of Arizona to track how much buzz there is about candidates, as well as the tone of that buzz. It crawls hundreds of blogs every day.

Free office software from IBM

IBM's word processing, presentation and spreadsheet software, called Lotus Symphony, is now free for anyone:

How is Lotus Symphony different?

You're in charge! Lotus Symphony is based on the Open Document Format (ODF) standard-which means you're not locked into proprietary file formats, software licensing agreements and upgrades. Finally, free tools and freedom of choice!

Can Lotus Symphony handle my existing files?

With Lotus Symphony, you can import, edit and save a variety of file formats including Microsoft Office files. You can even export your documents to Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF). The tools work with computers running both Microsoft Windows and Linux- environments, with support for Apple Macintosh planned for the future.

Joel Spolsky, who's always worth reading if you care about the business of software, uses the occasion to recall some software history and the original Lotus Symphony, "the software equivalent of Gigli."

Online Journalism Blog: "A model for the 21st century newsroom"

...first of a series:

The strengths of the online medium are essentially twofold, and contradictory: speed, and depth.

New media technologies are able to publish news faster than the previous kings of speed: TV and radio. Think mobile and email updates. Think moblogs. Think Twitter.

At the same time, the unlimited space and time of the web, and its hypertextual and ‘pull’ properties, make it potentially deeper and broader than the previous kings of context and analysis: newspapers and magazines. Think Wikipedia’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Think the Daily Kos. Think hyperlocal websites. Think Chicagocrime.org.

Squidwho

I've never used Squidoo, where you can "Share your knowledge and passion with the world," maybe because I lack one or the other. Its new companion page, Squidwho ("A people-powered Who's Who on the Web") may prove more useful to me:

Type in the name of someone famous.

We'll show you the single best fanpage on your favorite
writer, musician, movie star, business person or politician.

Even Michael Jackson, if you dare.

(We think you're famous, too. Make sure there's a page about you!)

Reflections of a Newsosaur: "Google's plan to poach election traffic"

Prompted by this Google page:

Australia Votes signals a significant strategic shift on the part of Google to become a primary web destination, as opposed to restricting itself to its historic role as a supplemental, though highly valuable, research tool. As such, it eventually could compete head to head with not only the likes of CNN, the Washington Post and all the other media biggies but also with the tiniest of tiny weeklies.

...

The Google election project, an elegant mashup of Google’s arsenal of search, mapping, video, widget and other technologies, is a preview of how all but the most technologically recalcitrant consumers will expect to get political – and many other types of – news in the future. In addition to delivering a wealth of well-packaged election information and interactive tools, Google has created four content-pushing widgets and a number of ways for users to express their opinions via forums and home-brewed video.

Media Life Magazine: "The emerging online-only local paper"

The article, an interview with the executive editor of VoicesOfSanDiego.org, begins:

In all the stories about the many troubles of the American newspaper, from falling circulation to fleeing ad dollars, we read almost nothing about the rise of a new kind of local newspaper, the online-only local daily. But in fact they exist, and we can expect to be hearing more about them as more launch. Typically they’re funded and supported by local residents upset over cutbacks in the coverage of their cities by the existing dailies.

Yahoo! MapMixer

 

... lets you upload the image of any map and overlay it on Yahoo! Maps:

The world is a big place. There are thousands of maps out there that provide unique details about any given destination. MapMixer is a new site that combines those maps with Yahoo! Maps to give you a better view of the world.

It's easy to mix your own map. Upload an image of your map, use our layering tool to align it with Yahoo! Maps and we'll do the rest! Your map will have all the features of Yahoo! Maps (zooming, panning). You can also syndicate it on your own site or blog.

Buy a biz reporter bio for $69.95

Talking Biz News writes that a site called NewsBios claims to have sold more than 7,000 "dossiers" on business journalists for $69.95:

Unlike ‘official’ bios and resumes that news organizations and individual reporters provide the public, NewsBios dossiers include pertinent public information about the reporters and editors it investigates. Recent “best sellers” include Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times, Dennis Berman of The Wall Street Journal and Patricia Sellers of Fortune.

Frequently, NewsBios turns up controversies in which the journalists have been involved; prior jobs the journalists would sooner forget; family relationships that might bear on how a journalist views a story; or opinions the journalists have expressed in venues other than their own news organization.

1,070,000 search results, give or take 1,069,741

Matt Waite wrote on his blog the other day that the new Web site he created, Politifact, already had "more than 1 million results in Google" after only two weeks online. That number sounded incredible to me, so I Googled Politifact, and found that Google did indeed report, in the blue bar at the top, that the results of that search were the first 1-100 of more than 1 million:

So I scrolled through the results to see which sites these were, and, when I got to the bottom, saw links for only five actual pages of results:

And when I clicked on the link for page 5, lo and behold, suddenly there were links for only three pages of results on the bottom. And at the top, on the blue bar where just minutes before it had reported 1,070,000 results for Politifact, it reported only 259:

You can try almost any search term and get wildly inconsistent counts each time you search. SearchEngineWatch demonstrated it using the nonsensical term djkfdkjfdkjddfdfdd. And a Frenchman demonstrated it using variations of Chirac and Sarkozy.

It's been obvious for a long time that Google search results are an entirely bogus form of evidence, as this 2004 MediaBistro article pointed out:

Writers crafting trend stories—or, for that matter, profiles, or lifestyle pieces, or reviews, or even news items—are always desperate to prove the popularity of whatever hot new thing they're identifying. They could do some reporting, of course, or find some statistical research, but instead they're technologically smitten, like everyone else. What's a simpler, or faster, way of quantifying a trend than typing a key word or phrase into Google? Type in almost any person, place, or thing, and Google will bounce back to you a neat numerical value that calculates that person, place, or thing's importance to this world. The writer can sit back and let the search engine's brainy algorithms do all the work—and then even pick up some tech-savvy bonus points, too. Google, and not polls or pie charts, has emerged as a journalist's best friend—and best source.

Not that Journalists are alone in this. Judges do it too:

A New York federal judge said a Google search had helped him decide that 24 Hour Fitness should not receive an injunction against a competitor that owned 24hourfitness.com. The judge said a search for "fitness industry" on the Internet revealed more than 1.6 million hits, mainly linking to sites related to physical training and conditioning.

Google Fight even purports to pick winners based on which search terms get the most results.

Google isn't the only purveyor of flaky numbers. When Robert Scoble found similar inconsistent results from MSN and Yahoo, it prompted him to ask, "Why aren’t there any truth in advertising laws for search engines?"

The problem is that we just don't know what's going on behind the scenes, so to cite any number churned out by a search engine as proof of something without knowing how it was generated is specious. It's a particularly egregious form of confirmation bias. The only Web page count we should trust is the one where we've used our own eyeballs to scrutinize each and every page.

After I pointed out the discrepancies, Matt did the search again and updated his blog to show that the Google results "now stands at 687,000."

"Regardless," he added, "the point remains — your Google hit count is a largely meaningless milestone, except to show that the site has spread widely."

Except it doesn't even show that. When I searched for Politifact again today, it showed 446,000:

Tomorrow, who knows?

World Telephone Numbering Guide

The World Telephone Numbering Guide: "provides information on the world's telephone numbering formats."

This includes various website links regarding telephone numbering. Area code lists, text articles, news of phone number changes, number-finding forms are included as much as feasible.

There is information under each country, region or service reference containing information such as area code or numbering changes, links to area code lists or numbering news, and subscriber number/area code formats to the extent WTNG can find and include such details.

Please note that details are missing in some cases, due to incomplete availability of phone numbering information. Also, the information is subject to some disclaimers."

Federal Election Commission Alerts

You can sign up for customized email notices from the Federal Election Commission, including "regulations, advisory opinions, news releases, campaign finance data, FEC conferences and more," here.

CoScripter

... is an IBM research project that automates Web tasks using easy-to-understand text files.

CoScripter is a system for recording, automating, and sharing processes performed in a web browser such as printing photos online, requesting a vacation hold for postal mail, or checking bank account information. Instructions for processes are recorded and stored in easy-to-read text here on the CoScripter web site, so anyone can make use of them. If you are having trouble with a web-based process, check to see if someone has written a CoScript for it!

It comes with a Firefox extension to help write the scripts, although it isn't required.

"40 Best Open Source Graphic Programs"

snap2objects ("DesignTips+Freebies+Inspiration") names them.

Evolution, er, Maltego, again

The personal data mining software I wrote about recently will be back soon, under a new name: Maltego. The creator says he pulled the software offline after receiving emails accusing him of trademark infringement and misusing the terms of service of a social networking site. He's made changes to compensate and promises that version 1.0 of the new app will be available in a couple of weeks and will "totally rock."

Import and republish data using Google Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheets now lets you import data from other sites, which you can then crunch and republish. You can import data from comma- and tab-delimited files, XML files, Web tables or lists and Google Reader.

To test it I copied the URL for the monthly civilian unemployment rate from FRED into a Google Spreadsheet cell, using one of Google's new import functions:

=ImportData("http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/UNRATE/downloaddata/UNRATE.csv")

Then I created a chart from the data, made the sheet public, and copied the code to embed the chart into another Web page. The chart is dynamic, so when the underlying data in Google Spreadsheets changes, the chart changes too. You can also choose to embed the spreadsheet itself, although in this case I chose not to. Each public spreadsheet also has its own feed, so someone can subscribe to your data and be notified automatically whenever it's updated.

All this is easy to do, assuming you know something about spreadsheets and data files. My biggest gripes were that editing the spreadsheet was balky on my modest home DSL connection, and I couldn't figure out how to make dates appear on the x axis of my chart (perhaps because there were too many). I also tried embedding the chart using the awful Google Page Creator, but it didn't work.

I don't know enough to know if this will be a viable way to serve data on the newspaper's Web site, but combined with the ability to manipulate spreadsheets with code, Google is become an ever more intriguing data platform.

E-Media Tidbits: "Blogging Without the Time Sink"

Amy Gahran explains:

It seems to me that the key to blogging efficiently is this: DO NOT treat it like writing an article. That is, make blogging part of your ongoing processes for research, notetaking, and communication.

Depth Reporting is that for me: It's my way of keeping up with what's out there, and if others find what I come across useful too, great. If not, that's OK too, because it was still worthwhile.

PeekYou

... calls itself "a new kind of online white pages":

A PeekYou profile helps other people find your websites, social-networking pages, photos, or anything else about you online. You can also create a profile for friends or relatives to ensure that they may also be easily found online.

The site claims to have more than 50 million profiles, although most I looked at randomly were pretty bare. Two potentially useful features: You can search by online user name, and you can narrow your search results by country, state and town.

Spreadsheet Addiction

The proprietor of Burns Statistics explains:

Some people will think that the "addiction" in the title is over the top, or at least used metaphorically. It is used literally, and is not an exaggeration. Addiction is the persistent use of a substance where that use is detrimental to the user. It is not the substance that is the problem -- more limited use may be beneficial. It is the extent and circumstances of the use that determine if the behavior is addictive or not.

Spreadsheets are a wonderful invention. They are an excellent tool for what they are good at. The problem is that they are often stretched far beyond their home territory. The overuse of spreadsheets is only too common.

How to Publish Linked Data on the Web

... explained here.

I learned about this page at this site, which tracks news about the Open Data movement:

Open Data is a philosophy and practice requiring that certain data are freely available to everyone, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control.