On vacation

Depth Reporting will be on vacation until Jan. 2, so posting will be light or non-existent, depending on my mood. Have a happy holiday.

Punch Clock Map

Interesting:

Beginning in 2006, the Sunlight Foundation launched the Punch Clock Campaign, asking all candidates for congressional office - challengers and incumbents - to promise, if elected, to post their daily schedules on the Internet. Lawmakers who agree to share their schedules, including who they’ve met with and why, show that they are responsive, open, transparent and above all accountable, leading to greater public trust. ...

The Punch Clock Map is an extension of the Punch Clock Campaign. It provides a visual representation of the meetings detailed in each member's schedule, to make it easy for everyone to see whom lawmakers have met with and how they serve their district's needs. Each point on this map represents the home-base location of the person or organization with whom a member of Congress has met, not where the meeting took place. The site also provides a weekly updated RSS feeds of the schedules for each member.

Unfortunately, no Kentucky or Indiana lawmakers have taken the pledge. Guess that makes it unlikely we'll get them to Twitter non-stop anytime soon, either.

New U.S. Courts Reference and Directory

This week I received an email promoting the free U.S. Courts Reference and Directory, a Web site that gives "an overview of trial court systems in every state and county in the United States." The Web site offers a handy grid that tells you which courts handle which types of cases -- not just felonies and misdemeanors, but also more specific things like small claims, foreclosures, ordinance violations, traffic violations, divorces, involuntary commitments, wills, name changes, paternity suits and more. It also gives a general overview of each court and has a directory with addresses, telephone numbers and links to information available online, if any. The site's so new, however, that its blog greeted me with the message, "Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here" when I clicked on the link for it. The site is by the same company that provides The Free Public Records Directory, mentioned here last year.

Webupon: "10 Extremely Useful Websites to Stop Big Brother From Snooping on You"

 From the intro:

If you are tired of receiving junk mail, spam and annoying telemarketing phone calls, then this list is for you. If you desire to take steps to stop the snooping from the government, hackers and marketing agencies, then this list will show you the way to privacy freedom.

Read/WriteWeb: "10 Semantic Apps to Watch"

The Read/WriteWeb defines a semantic application as an application that tries "to determine the meaning of text and other data, and then create connections for users." Here's its list of "10 Semantic Apps to Watch."

Make Google Charts with URLs

Yesterday Google released a tool that lets you make bar, pie, line and scatterplot charts and Venn diagrams just by specifying the information in a URL. You can then embed the charts in a Web page.

Here's an example:

The URL to create this chart looks like this:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvs&chs=200x125&chco=ff0000&chd=t:70,66,55,73&chtt=Homicides&chxl=0:|2004|2005|2006|2007&chxt=x

That looks nasty, but here's how it breaks down:

cht=bvs
makes a vertical bar chart

chs=200x125
specifies the chart size in pixels

chco=ff0000
is the chart color

chd=t:70,66,55,73
is  data for the chart. In this case the number of homicides in Louisville per year (I haven't checked this carefully, so assume the numbers are imaginary)

chtt=Homicides
the chart title

chxl=0:|2004|2005|2006|2007
the chart axis label

chxt=x
The location of the label. In this case, on the x axis.

To include the chart on a Web page, you include the URL as the src attribute in an HTML image tag, like so:

<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvs&chs=200x125&chco=ff0000&chd=t:70,66,55,73&chtt=Homicides&chxl=0:|2004|2005|2006|2007&chxt=x" />

There are many, many options, so you can make some pretty sophisticated charts, plotting up to a maximum of 4,096 values. Google says it originally built this tool for Google Finance.

Google limits you to 50,000 queries per user per day, so I'm not sure it's useful for a newspaper site, but that's more than enough for most blogs and personal Web sites.

Bubble 2.0

The real estate hustlers were denying the housing bubble long after it became obvious, just as Web 2.0 hustlers now deny the existence of another technology bubble. When that becomes the subject of an artful YouTube parody, you know it's time to sell.

Deep Web Research

Guess this is Marcus P. Zillman week at Depth Reporting. Here's an article he wrote for LLRX.com on "deep Web research":

The Deep Web covers somewhere in the vicinity of 900 billion pages of information located through the world wide web in various files and formats that the current search engines on the Internet either cannot find or have difficulty accessing. Search engines currently locate approximately 20 billion pages.

In the last several years, some of the more comprehensive search engines have written algorithms to search the deeper portions of the world wide web by attempting to find files such as .pdf, .doc, .xls, ppt, .ps. and others. These files are predominately used by businesses to communicate their information within their organization or to disseminate information to the external world from their organization. Searching for this information using deeper search techniques and the latest algorithms allows researchers to obtain a vast amount of corporate information that was previously unavailable or inaccessible. Research has also shown that even deeper information can be obtained from these files by searching and accessing the "properties" information on these files.

Locating Lawyers

LLRX.com gives a rundown on finding lawyers in all 50 states. For balance, though, we need a rundown on how to lose lawyers who have found you.

Lifehacker on How to Track Down Anyone Online

Derek Poore and Gary Swick both called my attention to this Lifehacker feature on tracking people down online. The one site mentioned there that hasn't been mentioned on Depth Reporting before is Who is This Person, a Firefox extension that lets you "Highlight any name on a web page and see matching information from Wink, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Facebook, Google News, Technorati, Yahoo Person Search, Spock, WikiYou, ZoomInfo, IMDB, MySpace and more..."

Incidentally, for a more comprehensive list of sites useful for finding people, check out Depth Reporting's The Most Useful Web Sites for Reporters and search for "People finders" as the subject. Suggestions for new sites to add are always welcome.

Computer-Assisted Reporting from a Canadian perspective

How about this, eh? The Canadian Journalism Project has a page devoted to computer-assisted reporting. This is how the project describes itself:

The Canadian Journalism Project (CJP) and its websites, J-Source.ca (English) and ProjetJ.ca (French), are projects of The Canadian Journalism Foundation in collaboration with leading journalism schools and organizations across Canada. Our goal is to enable a national conversation about the achievement of, and challenges to, excellence in Canadian journalism and provide a convenient and trustworthy source of information and commentary. The site provides a source for news, research, commentary, advice, discussion and resources. It also includes an expanding database of award-winning journalism, and links to other organizations that recognize and support excellence in journalism.

ResearchZilla.com: How the Social Internet Simplifies Source Identification

Skip the long and mostly irrelevant preamble to get to the meat of this article, which summarizes and grades Web sites that aggregate and organize information about people.

ExcelTips: Working with Elapsed Time

From the summary:

Since Excel stores times as numeric values, you can perform arithmetic operations on those values. This allows you to work with elapsed time, but doing so can present some results that may be confusing.

Updated Online Research Tools by Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A.

Zillman has updated his Online Research Tools (PDF), "a comprehensive listing of online research tools that offer various downloadable as well as web applications to allow you to do your research and searching on the Internet far more effective and productive."

Tech Tools for Voters

Information Today's NewsBreaks gives a rundown of "Tech Tools for Voters":

Election 2008 has unleashed a whole new tool chest for the voting public to engage, discuss, and interact with presidential candidates and members of Congress. Do you want more, in-depth answers to complicated questions on healthcare, global warming, border security, or social security? Do you want detailed, articulate, thoughtful answers to these and other complex issues that will affect the entire country for generations to come? The issues are too complicated and too important to be boiled down to a 30-second sound bite. Recently, several groups have launched tools and widgets that can help the average voter ask questions of the candidates. ...