Blows against the Empire:
Lots of reaction to the posting of the newly redesigned Poynter Website yesterday; generally the site seems to be a decent redesign with nice color, graphics and fonts; especially useful are the new weblogging features with allow for comments and permalinks. But for readers of Jim Romenesko's MediaNews, the change is devastating. It started out a few years ago as an independent Weblog (one of the first in journalism) called Media Gossip, and the site's fans were not unhappy when Poynter added the site to their lineup. Nice to see someone get rewarded for a lot of work creating something useful. But now the site no longer looks like a personal weblog. It's formatted to look just like the other Poynter pages. Longtime fans are up in arms. And here. To add insult to injury, some of the links to Poynter columns no longer work, so bloggers and site managers now have to change their pages. Bummer.

The weekly update:
NEWS LINKS: Not a lot of new links this week, but for some reason, lots of new sites cataloging international news sources. For years we relied on sites like Newslink, which started on the AJR website and is now independent, and the CJR Newspaper and Magazine Finders, and NewsDirectory (which is still great because it has an easy search); then added newer sites like Kiosken, ABYZ and Gebbie; recently I've liked the news directory from The Guardian. But new ones keep popping up; I listed one last week and a couple more this week (see News below).
I guess there's value in creating one of these things, and it's nice to have a variety to choose from; although I've tried several I usually go back to the first ones I started with. Another one I've used faithfully for years is PrensaLatina, which started out as the news links page of MundoLatino.org. Interestingly, there's now a MundoLatino.com, with its own media guide, which looks pretty good too. It's hard to keep track as sites change hands, are incorporated into others, etc. Even harder when two sites show up with virtually the same name.

Some Interesting stories/Weblogs:

The Rhetorica Network by a professor of rhetoric who is also a former journalist: contains his comments on politics, a weblog about the 2004 presidential campaign, a nice list of media websites, and political links.

MSNBC: Weblog Central finds some of the best weblogs out there.

Seattle Times creates a Spotlight Team; profiles of team members and I-team members in this column from editor Mike Fancher.

Philadelphia Inquirer: 5-part series on developing the waterfront.

URL's: A cautionary tale Jonathan Dube continues his "how to use URLs to find information" tips with a story of how to identify faked URLs (like a fake NYT story). At Poynter.

Fun/Entertaining:

Indian Foods a beautiful Indian cooking site.

And the useful links:
Reference

Merck Manual Home Edition available as interactive or original text version.

Medline Plus Health Information: Gay and Lesbian health.

Old Testament Gateway

History of Minneapolis compiled by public librarians. Very nice.

African American Inventors

PCWebopedia In the dark about computer or internet terms? Want to know more? Check here. This page also has some good Reference files, including ASCII tables, data format file extension list, timeline of the Internet...

Monticello lots and lots of Jefferson history at this site.

Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism has a database of terrorist incidents by date.

Black and Christian "a Voice for the African American Religious Community". Has church directory, history, etc.
News

Paperball searches German language newspapers. Seems to be just most recent couple of days' stories.

Clarín: Edición Electrónica. Get fulltext images of all pages of today's edition. Available free for now.

MediaWorld.info: Newspaper links another place to go for international news links.

Headline Spot I've highlighted several of the "Spot" sites before but this one is a pretty neat news portal, worth mentioning again. Check the "SpotNetwork" pulldown list for more Spots.
Statistics

Mapping Census 2000: Atlas of Diversity lots of maps have been added to this....
Journalism

The Times Style Guide from Times of London.
Public Records

Journalist's Toolbox: Public Records a good directory.

North Carolina Business Court has opinions online.
Florida

Monroe County occupational license search search by business name or owner name.

Dade County Police Benevolent Assn
Tools

I-Tools formerly "Find-It" and "Research-It", simple pages with search forms for search tools, language tools, reference tools.

Alta Vista the search service has been redesigned with a new simple front page. Searching should be improved, there's a new News section. Take the tour of what's new to find out.
Governments/Politics,People, Business: no links this week.