Loading up on goodies:
....Before I leave on (yet another) vacation. I promise this is the last this year. Should be back around the 1st of Nov, I don't think I'll be getting any Net access where I'm going.....to the cold!

If you have to do any more research on the terrible Terri Schiavo story, Florida Blog is collecting links to lots of Schiavo editorials and commentary. This story reinforces the need for everyone to have some sort of advance directive. Two good resources: Aging With Dignity Tallahassee-based organization offers help and "5 wishes" form. This site also has news articles, columns, etc. A copy of the 5 Wishes document is also on the Learning Place.

Just in case for some, strange reason you don't read ResourceShelf: Links for upcoming news events: nice compilation from Gary Price.

PR Newswire press releases by category, from LA Times. (If this link doesn't work, go to LA Times business page, click on 'press releases' in left-hand column.

American Factfinder, from Census, has been redesigned. This is the place to go for finding community profiles from 2000 and 1990 censuses. It's also easier to use: click on Fact Sheet to get a national profile. Change the geography to get a smaller area. (enter address and ZIP, or city and state.) You'll get a general profile; click on 'show more' under a section to get the full Census report on that area. Detail available for city or ZIP code. Also click for maps or click on 'brief' to get the Census brief on that aspect of population. Lots more information available from main FactFinder page, too.

Reporting on Religion: nice list of resources compiled by Poynter's David Shedden.

Trade Stat Express new site from U.S. Commerce Dept with export-import trade stats (national and state).

UK Land Register search property records. Covers England and Wales.

Tattoo Artist Database: well, you never know when you'll need it....

And, I've added more links to the Herald blog.
See you next week!

Vanity Searches:
Steve Outing, in Poynter's E-Media Tidbits, came up with the perfect use of Amazon.com's new book text search engine. Put in your own name and see what books you're mentioned in. I found three. Although I know there are several more, these are biggies:
In All the President's Men by Woodward and Bernstein:
(credits) ". . . Jr., Lawrence Meyer, Larry Fox, Bill Brady, Douglas Feaver, Elisabeth Donovan, Philip Geyelin, Meg Greenfield, Roger Wilkins and Maureen Joyce. . . ."
In The Miami Herald Report: Democracy Held Hostage:
". . . the ballot review and other reporting efforts. Herald research editor Elisabeth L. Donovan and reporter Daniel A. Grech rate special mention. Also, mention . . ."
In Carl Hiaasen's Team Rodent:
". . . Acknowledgments For their assistance I am indebted to the intrepid Liz Donovan and the daring Jennifer Dienst. . . ."
(Now you can have proof; not to mention a great research tool.)

Can't resist this one:
How to...use a library, in the Guardian. Wonderful essay. I could quote the whole thing. I'll restrain myself to one small section:
"Libraries were the original internet. All knowledge was available even in a local branch library. ..Of course, many libraries now have free internet access, which is useful for looking up things online, such as the library opening times. "
(via the Blogrunner library feed linked in previous posting.)

Maybe a little more entertaining:
Have added several posts to Herald blog, on a lighter note.

Random finds:

Good links on the Diebold voting system problems in a nice summary on the CS Monitor library's LibLog blog.

Web helps compete in community publishing: story in Cyberjournalist about newspaper Web sites doing innovative things.

EBituaries cached Web pages from e-commerce failures: the announcements of Web site deaths. (via USA Today).

Blogrunner this tool pulls news from blogs and categorizes it.

Bloglines RSS reader, Web-based, no software required.

Tom Mangan on RSS summary and good links.

And (added at 3:45): Jenny Levine on The Spartanburg Herald-Journal's latest blogging effort) (with breaking news! and an RSS feed! But registration required).
And: A new Blogrunner feed on libraries (via Steven Cohen's Library Stuff).

NICAR madness:
Lots of fun today on the NICAR-L computer assisted reporting listserv, after Derek Willis posted a link to his Web page with a searchable database of who's posting to the listserv. Nice description of how the project was done, too.
Mentioned in the discussion: Derek also has an XML blog with news about the use of XML/RSS in journalism. It's pretty obvious this is needed, as one poster on NICAR-L commented that he searched the archives and found not one mention of XML.

In other blogging news:
Users of some blogging software (especially Moveable Type, it seems) are concerned about some of the hotshot features. "Comment Spam" is getting to be a big problem: although the comment feature in some blogs is a wonderful thing, spammers have figured out how to ruin it with obnoxious or pornographic messages. Another handy feature, Trackback (which finds postings related to a posting, is skewing Google searches, some believe. The creators of Moveable Type have lots to say about these on the Six Log, Web site of Six Apart.
(Sometimes, reading this stuff, I'm glad I have simple no features Blogspot.)

Baseball Mania:
As an old American League diehard, Red Sox fan (even a Yankees fan for some years of my childhood), getting interested in the Marlins has been a stretch. The '97 win was exciting, but that was a bought-to-go-to-the-Series team. This team is different. I've been hooked on them since I watched Dontrelle Willis pitch for the first time. I can't get enough of Jean Pierre. And Jack McKeon personifies the old baseball I used to love.

So for all the rest of you non-Marlins fans, I say: No matter who you root for, check out The Miami Herald's World Series coverage. This is some entertaining stuff. If nothing else, read Dan Le Batard's front-page game summaries every day. Today's column is a classic:
First he tells us about the Marlins kids on the bus, hanging out the windows, shouting "''Here come the Fish!'' and ''Get out of the way!'' and ``Here we come to ruin New York's day!''", like a high-school team on the way to the county playoffs. Then this:
"And you know what Wells' reaction was as soon as Castillo's little bloop dropped?
In front of the nation's television cameras, Wells screamed at the top of his lungs, ``You've got to be [bleeping] kidding me!''
Mr. Wells, welcome to what it feels like to play the Marlins."

Weekend update: The weekly reference collection/research gleanings:

This week's links (and every week's) could not have been produced without the great resources provided by lots of unselfish people whose sites I faithfully read, knowing they'll show me things I didn't know. To me this is the power of blogging: having access to others' thoughts and knowledge.
Of course this list includes people like Gary Price, from whom I steal several good resources (like statistical reports and studies) every week. I've been getting great tips on new public records resources from the Virtual Chase newsletter from Genie Tyburski. I find great investigative and CAR news reports from Derek Willis' The Scoop. Romenesko provides media stories, and Al's Morning Meeting useful links for covering specific stories. Yahoo's What's New, and USA Today's daily Web links page often provide fun stuff. I also find fun and interesting things from group blogs like Metafilter and Boing Boing, and personal blogs like IDO3 and Presurfer. I get several emails a week from various information resources like LII and Scout Report, and also check lots of journalists and librarians' blogs, as well as some you might not expect.

I don't always cite the source where I found these links, and I'm not going to create links here to each of the citations above. But know that the ones I read and use most are always linked in the left-hand column here (some of the journalist blog links rotate). My much fuller blog list has most of the blogs I read regularly; some daily, some weekly, some less frequently. The list of What's New? resources lists some of the more traditional sources, and the public records sources are on the Public records page.
One of these days I'll compile everything into a better, more organized list.
But then....do I want to give away all my secrets?

I discussed what blogging means to me a little on my Herald blog yesterday; and the list of wonderful resources mentioned above is proof that for me, blogging is linking. So, at that:

The useful links....

Reference :

Jewish Encyclopedia: "This website contains the complete contents of the 12-volume Jewish Encyclopedia, which was originally published between 1901-1906."

History of the World Series from Sporting News. Choose a year from pull-down menu on left.

United Nations Research Guide from Mississippi State U. library.

The Quilt Index the place to go for research on quilts, covering collections nationwide.

Deb's Historical Research page: Amazing collection of links to sites with info on daily life in past centuries.
News:

Palestinian news & opinion Web sites: nice collection from Online Journalism Review's Mark Glaser.

Virgina Pilot sniper trial coverage is being directly posted from courtroom to blog via wireless.

Presidential Campaign 2004: Newsbank compiles stories from the many newspapers they archive.

"Wilsongate"? Here's a good collection of stories and links on the Wilson/Plame/CIA leak question, compiled by a blogger.

Resources on chronic pain and medication addiction collected by Poynter.

The Antarctic Sun: the first newspaper from (way) down under.
Journalism:

Math test for journalists from IRE.

ACES online quizzes: test your knowledge.
Governments, Politics:

2004 Presidential Election Profiles from Center for Responsive Politics, campaign finance stats.

Bolivian Government: official page. Presidency page, however, is down.

Maine Memory has historical files and photographs. Searchable.
Tools:

Bloogz searches Weblogs and RSS feeds in several languages.

Central Ops offers several geek tools including email search, and a domain name search recommended by Gary Price.
Public Records:

Offender.us has links to offender searches nationwide. Here's another good list at The Virtual Chase. Also via Virtual Chase:

New address for Idaho corrections search

Michigan crimial record search from state police. Must register; there's a fee. People:

Political Biographies of world leaders, in Spanish, from Fundació Cidob in Barcelona. Good long profiles. (link found via Zarate's Political Collections, classic info on political leaders.)
Business:

RecallWarnings.com: this site provides information on product recalls by category. (It also has political recalls.)
Florida, Statistics: No links this week.

Some Interesting stories/Weblogs:

U.S. Vote 2004 Guardian Web log will discuss U.S. Election 2004.

On the Map, out of Touch: Tim Porter provides reason why endorsing a candidate in a statewide election might not be useful for a urban-center newspaper.

CosBlog: Weblog of Cosmo Macero, Boston Herald columnist.

Iraq War Blog from a military viewpoint. Nice photos.

Esquire's greatest stories ever told: celebrating their 70th anniversary. Their pick for greatest: Gay Talese's Frank Sinatra has a cold. That's a good one, but my pick is the Junior Johnson story by Tom Wolfe. That one impressed me a lot....back in 1965....

Also: 70 years of Esquire covers

Man steals identity -- of a sex offender. Fun story from sexcriminals.com.
Fun/Entertaining:

Famous Fonts: get fonts based on company logos, rock-group publicity, TV shows and more.

Apple's ITunes for Windows now available for download.

The Open Video Project: public domain videos available for download.

British Pathe Archive now has stills pulled from years (1896-1970) of archived newsreel films. This site has been nearly unavailable since the recent announcment (moving images were made available a couple years ago) and is still slow.

Posting and posting:
...Lots of stuff to the Herald blog, including a new Iraq blog on the military there, sniper trial news, great history and word links, and a newspaper from Antarctica.
...I also added some later posts, on blogging and Doc. (5:00 p.m.)

And this:
Some research finds are just too good to share, but I can't hoard this one since it comes from the Christian Science Monitor library's blog, LibLog. Networking, at Elyon.com is an incredible tool that lets you put in a company name and get past employees. A search on 'Miami Herald' gets 345! And each listing shows you the employment history of the person, including news stories he or she has been mentioned in. This is amazing. Imagine the investigative work you can do with this......

Enterprise:
The Miami Herald's John Dorschner goes online and buys Vicodin. (Maybe Rush should have done this.)

Online voting:
The Herald's online poll asks Who will win the Series? The answer so far: Marlins in six or seven.

Dubious timing?
The Herald today has a lovely story by Douglas Hanks on smoked fish spread, an old-time Miami treat.
"This is a dish happily free of metaphor, stuck somewhere near 1978 in old-school South Florida, before lofts and J.Lo, before fusion, before Gourmet ever cared what chefs were doing with mangoes down here."
A nice read, recipe included, and nice to see 'old Miami' celebrated. It's hard to find these days. But, a nitpick: The most popular smoked fish in South Florida? Marlins! Couldn't we have picked another week for this one?

Liblog:
The Christian Science Monitor Library's LibLog has been on my links list for quite awhile, but I didn't know (despite an email from Leigh Montgomery telling me they were switching to new software) that the URL had changed. The blog, formerly a hand-built product, is now on Typepad, and it's beautiful. And even better, The Guardian's weblog this week listed LibLog as a 'Best link'.
LibLog is again a link on the blogroll in left-hand column; I'll update the link on the Blog list later.

Rosen on Weblogs:
Ten things that make Weblogs radical journalism by Jay Rosen on his Pressthink blog. Each of the ten items has interesting links, like This history/definition of Weblogs. Fascinating. Item 10:
"10.) Journalism traditionally assumes that democracy is what we have, information is what we seek. Whereas in the weblog world, information is what we have—it’s all around us—and democracy is what we seek."

Marlins win!?
OK, so we're all a little shocked here, too....

Fast work at IRE:
They've posted some resources for covering the Staten Island Ferry crash on the Web site. That is, at least according to a message to the NewsLib and NICAR lists. I can't get into IRE.org right now.....

We're excited:
The Marlins have made it to the 7th game of the National League Championships, and we can't believe it. Fun story from AP on Florida offering asylum to the Wrigley fan who may have interfered with foul ball... Also, an online poll on Herald.com on what Floridians want to say to him.

(Interestingly, The Sun-Times identified him, most papers didn't.)

BTW, New Yorkers are bummed about the Oct. 8 NYTimes editorial hoping for a Red Sox/Cubs series ; maybe the fact that The Times company is part owner of the Boston team had something to do with it?.
But Marlins fans are teed off more about this part:
"...Florida Marlins, a team for which it is hard to muster much enthusiasm if you're a baseball traditionalist. The Marlins, a major league team only since 1993, were essentially an artificial construct. The team's original owner, Wayne Huizenga, dismantled it after it won a championship in 1997 because the team was too expensive, then sold it in 1999. Improbably, the team finds itself knocking on the door again with a cast of largely low-paid youngsters."
Umm....that's the point, isn't it? A team of unknowns making it to the playoffs? Underdog wins? We're all cheering here.

On Herald Blog today: more voting machine questions, Terri Schiavo and a DC sniper trial blog.

Herblock's Gift:
The late Herb Block gave his files including lots of original cartoons to the Library of Congress. This is the exhibit, online.

Reporting stories:
Interesting Poynter (Bill Mitchell) interview with Alicia Shepard on her oral history of Woodward and Bernstein (in last month's Washingtonian).
"Their friendship is what Robert Redford told me initially attracted him to the Watergate story. Not the politics -– but the people. They are obviously two very different men, who Bernstein admits would not have been friends had it not been for Watergate. Yet over the decades they've forged a deep, meaningful, reliable friendship. They went through something together that only they can understand. "

I've posted on stories about the latest identical letters to the editor, and Ali Abbas' new arms, on the Herald blog.

Fall photos:
Definitely not Miami.

Weekend update: The weekly reference collection/research gleanings:

This week I posted lots of stuff to the Herald blog, so you might want to check what's there too. I've made sure the best reference links are posted here, though, and I've duplicated some, particularly in the 'entertaining' section. Maybe one of these days I'll figure out the perfect format for this......

I do still consider this blog to be for things of interest to journalists and news researchers, along with some personal comments. The Herald blog I consider a more general blog, newsy and full of links to useful tools but not necessarily journalism oriented. I know some might not read it just because the Herald pages often take a long time to load. I hope that is improving.

The useful links....

Reference :

Lancet articles since 1823 are now all available online. There are abstracts of several historically significant articles available for free, including several by Joseph Lister, the first report on malformations due to thalidomide, and a first use of intravenous therapy in 1832. Articles cost $30 for fulltext PDF.

Medical history of U.S. Presidents

Criminal investigation and forensic science: Sources for scholars and aficionados. Very nice collection of links.

Consumer Search find consumer reviews of products by category. Reviews come from varying sources like consumer reports, amazon.com, magazines like Good Housekeeping, etc. This is really handy (via Gary Price and LII).

The Idiom Connection: English idioms.
News:

Harbor Watch News all the news there is about marine issues, waterfronts, boating, fishing, etc. Seems to be pretty current, complete and worldwide.

Google News España en español.
Tools:

Newsletter distribution via RSS: useful to anyone considering an email newsletter...this may be a better alternative. Article from LLRX.

Xywrite was our official word processor for many years and I still know people that use it, even if it's a DOS program. It was an elegant file manager as well as an excellent writing program. This site still has downloadable files and screen shots.
Journalism:

Video: Tony Ridder's speech at National Press Club (Story from Milwaukee Journal).
Governments, Politics:

Election Central blog featuring news about voting machine problems nationwide.

State by state list of Do Not Call registries from FTC.

State photo galleries: directory of state promotional photos and graphics materials from FirstGov; Florida not available.
Statistics:

U.S. Health Trends, 2003 from CDC.

U.S. Transportation Fatalities, 2002: stats from National Transportation Safety Board.

Windows on Urban Poverty has a mapping function to see poverty and changes by state/county/MSA, plus a PDF report. From UT/Dallas.

Smart Growth America: organization provides resources for containing sprawl, including links to news stories. Check the Newsroom section for a source list and a journalists' resource guide. There's also a Data Bank.

Florida Transportation Profile from U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Links to other states here too.

State of World Population, 2003 from UN.
Florida:

Boca Raton Airport has a flight tracking service. The system will soon be installed at Martin County airport, too, according to Joe Adams. (I couldn't make this work at work, though....maybe a firewall problem?)
Public Records, Business, People: no links this week.

Some Interesting stories/Weblogs:

Stump: a new politics-and-the-media blog from Poynter.

BushCheney04 Blog: now, an official blog. RSS feeds, linking logos and lots more.

Discourse.net: a new blog from UM Law prof. Michael Froomkin.

Mother Jones has a 'Daily Mojo' blog.

The Media Borg special series on Salon.com on corporate consolidation of the information industries.

Amazon.com butterfly ballot: What?

Words without borders international writers' site offers lots of stories from Iraq.

QM2: all about the new Queen Mary.

Best Drive Thru in America, 2003 ranks fast food. Chick Fil-A comes in first, Taco Bell second.

Kevin Sites
Fun/Entertaining:
(Some of these have already been linked on the Herald blog)

French Ministry of Culture 'erreur 404' page.

"Not Martha" has a great collection of links to Holloween 2003 recipes. Including Mexican sugar skulls and an edible meat filled skull. (via Boing Boing).

Halloween Web links: good collection from URLWire.

Star Spangled Ice Cream "with a conservative flavor". (via Cursor).

Tea.co.uk: the ultimate tea page.

The Online Picasso Project: amazing catalog of every work, day to day chronology of the artist's entire life.

Imagequest has some amazing photos of marine life.

What does $87 billion look like? a visualization.

Light posting here, more there:
I've been posting to the Herald blog, with some links to stories about people who aren't making it in this economy, as well as several fun and entertaining links.

Hellonearth.com, site of a German journalist, reports on what it was like to be confused with the Florida band's Web site when they were on top of the news. (Their site is Hellonearth.net, although it was hit with denial of service attacks and may still be down.) 'Gee', owner of hellonearth.com, got some interesting emails out of this....including one from a leader of the Raelian movement. Link via Tom Mangan's Prints the Chaff.

Bragging rights:
Al Neuharth has again given us a list of newspapers that are doing it right. The Miami Herald gets high marks.

And, via Blandiose:
Stump: a new politics-and-the-media blog from Poynter.


A really nice Flash presentation
I saw these photos the other day in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, and loved them. So it was nice to see the multimedia version recommended on Poynter's E-Media Tidbits: School Picture Day. (Smile for the camera!)

Something else I missed while gone:
Elizabeth Spiers (the Gawker) launched her new blog on the New York Magazine site: The Kicker.

Back in the heat:
It's not quite as hot in Miami as it was before I left, but still in the high 80s/low in high 70s. In the 20-some years I've been here, though, we've usually not had a break in the weather til after Columbus Day weekend. So hanging on for a little while longer.

I've posted on money, food, and another candidate blog on the Herald blog.

While I was gone, a bit of discussion on various blogs about bloggers at the Tampa Tribune who seemed to all shut down their blogs at once. Were they all told not to? A good recap of the situation at JD Lasica's new blog site.

Every blogger on the planet linked to this last week:
But just in case you missed it, Nieman Reports published a huge takeout on blogging and journalism (pages 59-98 in this PDF of the entire issue). (There are links to separate articles in this posting on JD's site.)

And more...
Lots of buzz about the Journey to Vatican III blog at the Spokesman Review. I'm a little suprised at how many Catholic blogs there are out there, although I have been occasionallly reading Relapsed Catholic for a couple years now, I'm intrigued by some of these others...like Saintly Salmagundi...fascinating stuff, especially for someone like me whose world was rocked by Vatican II.

If you haven't checked out blogging at the Spokesman Review, see the Blogging @Spokesmanreview.com blog where you can get daily summaries of what's new on all their blogs.

The Slot's Bill Walsh has another blog, Off-Topic. Another link from Tom Mangan's Prints the Chaff. And via Walsh, a link I've been meaning to post, to one of my fave TV personalities, Alton Brown's blog (but Alton hasn't updated since July, so why bother?). And on the way, Mangan has an interesting post with a code of conduct for newspaper bloggers.

And by the way...still in upstate NY, the apple trees are loaded and the grapes are delicious, including the grape pie from Naples. The apple cider is to die for. Just thought you'd want to know. And temps in the 30s at night are a real treat after Miami, although the breezy 50s during the day make it a little hard to spend much time on the Lake Ontario shore.....

(Added at 11:00 am:) Some Bob Graham links on Herald blog.

Some rambles:
Nice new design at The Shifted Librarian.

I've been adding some stuff to the Herald blog....(link above)...

And, in this story:
The Miami Herald's Glenn Garvin reports that the drugs Rush Limbaugh was reportedly taking can cause sudden massive hearing loss.

No postings?
Greetings from upstate New York. It's cold and starting to look like fall. Nice change from Miami. Although I've got a good Net connection, my Mom is keeping me busy, so haven't had much time to browse around. So nothing to post now...will probably get something in during this week, though...back in Miami on Thursday.