Enough winter?:
Need to see some green? We've got enough to go around:

(more)

All the blogging:
Is on the other blog.
I'll be posting links I've collected during the week over the weekend, though.....

More:
Via Derek Willis, two things:

Gary Price and Chris Sherman gave an LOC lecture today on Internet searching trends. The handout/presentation is available here: Web Research: what's new in 2004. And the description and info about Real Audio feed is here from the Library of Congress.

First-n-Main is a blog on growth, development and sprawl from Joe Newman, Orlando Sentinel writer, formerly with PB Post, St. Pete Times. Also has Great links page and lots more.

A couple things:
If you're interested in getting access to Atom feeds from Blogger blogs (like mine) and your aggregator won't read Atom (since it's not RSS, but a new feed format), here's A list of aggregators that accept Atom feeds, from Atom.

And, if you doubt that the younger generation doesn't need anything from 'old media', just read this new blog from Lorika. She's mad. An excerpt:

"We are sick of you dog-piling on a story that is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, feeding on each other like cannibals.
And we are most sick of the dizzying lurching spin you put on every single "story" you report.
We just want it straight - the real story. The impartial story, the way it was meant to be."

(via Kaye Trammell.)

Don't miss this:
Jeff Jarvis has lots to say today about perception of the media, from the BBC to New Hampshire political commentators. This one post doesn't cover it all, scroll up and down. But this one has my favorite quote:

"...news is a conversation. It's not as if, once the oracle who owns the press or the broadcast tower speaks, we have heard the truth and can stop the search for it. Of course, we can't. It takes time and openness and curiosity and effort and a great deal of back and forth with contributions from many diverse sources and viewpoints adding onto each other to perhaps pile up to the truth. "

On this topic:
The Miami Herald has recently added several Reader Q&A columns produced by Herald writers. People like Dan Gillmor and Jeff Jarvis keep reminding us that 'News is a conversation'. The Herald is doing it. Congrats to all the Herald columnists who are doing this, and especially to Robert Steinback, who started it.

Research tool:
Via Genie Tyburski's TVC Alert, a link to Chris Sherman's review of new research software RocketDesktop. Here's an online tour of RocketDesktop. Looks like this software will not only organize all your news sources for searching and archiving results, but will also handle RSS feeds for reading your favorite blogs and other feeds. There's a free trial and a $29.95 annual fee.
I've not tried any research organizer tools yet, but there are wonderful things out there that many wouldn't be without. Of course, FURL, for organizing Web pages and URLS you want to refer back to, has been getting lots of attention in last few days. Today Sree Sreenivasan has more suggestions from readers.
AskSam has a great reputation for organizing projects, their latest newsletter mentions a library research requests database project. Some rely on tools like Clickgarden, NetSnippets, Cartagio, and lots more.
How do you decide which to try? I haven't. But Rocketdesktop, with its news aggregator function, might fill the bill, and FURL is tempting too.

Pity the poor political correspondent:
Dave looks really, really cold in this picture. Dave: Wear a hat!

Oh, those crazy investment bankers:
A candidate for a stupidity award, in this Miami Herald story from Key West.

Lots more:
On the other blog.

In The Herald today:
The irrepressible Fred Grimm on why South Floridians don't care much about the Iowa and NH votes.

And, a major project series using prison and probation records to analyse withheld adjudication: Justice Withheld by city editor Manny Garcia and database editor Jason Grotto, first of four parts.

Weekend update: Other things I found this week:

I've started collecting links from the Appalachian mountains, since I've always had a special fondness for the area (I lived and had a natural food store in Black Mountain, NC for about 5 years after leaving DC. Even when I lived in DC the Shenandoah/Blue Ridge Parkways were where I headed whenever I could get out. Now we own a house in far Western NC and go there whenever we can.)
So I'm thinking about doing a page just of mountain links. I've found some good ones lately, even a few blogs. One is a photoblog by a Boone, NC, photojournalist, Marie Freeman, called Blue Ridge Blog. She's had some beautiful photos recently.
This week I found Blue Ridge Music Trails: a guide for travelers to the Appalachians. I really hoped the Floyd (VA) Country Store was my secret (and thousands of Washington Post readers', since they wrote about the Friday night hoedown a couple years ago). But I'm also glad to see they also mention the Friday night concerts at the Campbell Folk School, in Brasstown, where I'll be heading. If you love real country music, this is a useful resource.

See where all this blogging/linking stuff can lead you? A whole new world.

More useful links....

Reference :

Who knew Crayola had a database of colors? This one links to Burnt Sienna, and includes a cultural history of brown, and historical information on this Crayola crayon. What a fun reference tool! Found via Wonkette, of all places.

Searchable database of Grammy winners.

Printable maps of the U.S. from National Atlas.

NANPA: area codes database from North American Numbering Plan.

WW II RAF Reconnaissance photos: over 5 million, digitized. New site, has not worked for me yet. Also see this BBC site.

Birmingham Civil Rights Center new redesigned site.

Iraqi Society for Higher Education Abroad: Iraqi academics' site, in Arabic but has translate to English function. BBC story about this.

Ships of the World: a historical encyclopedia.
Tools:

RSS Reader from Yahoo (in beta). If you are on MyYahoo, you can have it add RSS feeds from blogs, news sites, etc. to your page.

Two other Web-based news readers getting attention: Bloglines and My Feedster.
Journalism:

Gannett News Department's Web site is now online to the public. This includes lots of good work, training, standards, and resources, although some are still restricted by passwords (G), like the Census resources.
Business:

Financial Institution Fraud and Failure Report, 2003 long PDF from FBI. Contains statistics on investigations, including by city. There are descriptions of major investigations too.
Statistics:

State-level U.S. military casualties, Korean conflict, Vietnam War from National Archives. You can get them sorted alphabetically or by hometown within a state.
Governments, Politics:

Congressional Preview Package, 2004 from Capital Eye (Center for Responsive Politics), on the issues.

Beyond Red and Blue Mass. journal Commonwealth proposes a new political map of the U.S. (via Sheila Lennon.)
News:

Baltimore Sun RSS feeds: for getting mail direct to your news reader.

More for your news aggregator: PR Newswire RSS feed
Florida, Public Records, People: no links this week.

Some Interesting stories/Weblogs:

Wonkette: a new Gawker-style blog for DC.

An Orchid blog from Caracas, with incredible pictures.

The Pants on Fire Mobile Is on its way to South Florida. (via Florida Blog).

Mariani v. Bush suit from 9/11 widow claimes administration knew in advance, did not use proper procedures to avoid tragedy.

New syndication:
Blogger has now activated a new syndication feature, using Atom. (This came out recently in discussion of why Blogger wasn't supporting RSS). The new syndication is available to every Blogger user, Just by going to Template/Settings/Site Feed and clicking Yes under "Site Feed". I've activated mine; the feed will be at http://newsresearch.blogspot.com/atom.xml. There are some questions about which aggregators/readers will be able to read the Atom feed. We'll see......

Some questions on Atom discussed on Blogger Blog.

Exciting times:
There seems to be a real dialogue (multilogue?) going on right now about the state of the news business, credibility and interactivity. Besides the links I've pointed to today and yesterday, more:

Tom Mangan, in "Earth to Mr. Clifton" disputes the Plain Dealer editor's latest blog entry about whether readers think papers aren't biased.

Tim Porter discusses Jay Rosen's comments about the Press as a political player, and says:

"Newspapers must break free of the self-important institutional mindset of "the press" and pursue individual identities that establish them not as political players, a role that looks inward to the makers of news, but as servants of the community, a role that faces outward to the readers of news."

Revealing secrets:
Jay Rosen reveals that The Press is a player in politics in his PressThink Blog. Hmm. That's becoming pretty obvious with all the flurry over the Dean rant.

And, on this topic:

Jim Morin's cartoon today:



And, of course, Dave Barry on the campaign trail. Check out the ad at top.

More on blogs/feeds:
Jeff Jarvis on how some still don't get the blogging concept:

"But you have to think in new ways. It's no long about the one guy with the press or the conch or the blog. It's about everybody.
Enable the citizens."

That's the ticket.

Fooling around with RSS:
I found an RSS feed that should be very worthwhile for news researchers: Snopes.com's feed gives you news about the newest "urban legends" they've heard of. I like this one, supposedly Florida-based....
So how do you get this? I found a link to add this to a MyFeedster feed. But you can get it in any news aggregator by going to Snopes.com and looking for the feed: It's linked on the Recent Additions page.

Save that link!:
From the new Industry Standard blog (no, the magazine isn't back, but it's postings by former Standard writers....):
New York Times Link Generator. Says here you can enter a link from a current NYT story and it will give you a link to the story that won't expire. Useful for bloggers.

Getting serious:
Tim Porter is back, and on a roll. Today he posts a thoughtful essay on blogging, and how it's regarded by the media.
There's been a lot on this topic lately, pro and con. But Porter focuses on blogging as public journalism, like the recent request of blogger Joshua Micah Marshall for donations to cover the New Hampshire primary, which brought in nearly $5000 from readers.
Says Porter:

"First, media fragmentation continues. Every minute someone spends reading Josh Marshall or any other blogger is time not spent reading a newspaper (or watching television, for that matter). Media is growing. The number of hours in the day are not. The relevance of newspaper reporting on the information mindshare of the public is shrinking."

How newspapers can avoid losing out:

"With political coverage for example, why couldn't reporters also file daily updates to blogs as well as turn in more traditional stories? (Jim Camden of the Spokesman-Review does this in his blog, Spin Control.)
If a newspaper is sending more than one reporter, why couldn't one of them carry a video camera or file only online?" -- "... readers will pay for quality - quality as they define it, not quality as defined by an anonymous set of editors."

Good advice.

Dance to Dean:
I posted links to Dean speech dance mixes, and much more, on the other blog.

Short winters in the UK:
It's January, and the snowdrops are coming out in England. The photo was from Lakelandcam (in the north!) but has expired; there was one on Cornwallcam a couple days ago.

Good use of the State of the Union:
South Knox Bubba is promising to give money to Habitat for Humanity for every time GWB uses certain words or combinations in the speech.

Journalists in the news:
Welsh newspaper editor wins lottery and resigns immediately. From BBC.

What else I've been doing:
Some Martin Luther King links on the Herald blog, as well as some other things.

XML? RSS? What?
Help with RSS from the Librarians' Index to the Internet, who tell you how to set up the free Web-based news aggregator from Bloglines.

Praise for editor blog:
After initial skepticism, Tom Mangan of Prints the Chaff has good things to say about Doug Clifton and his blog, the first blog by a top major newspaper editor.

Caucus coverage:
BBC reporters are blogging reports from Iowa.

Weekend update: The weekly reference collection/research gleanings:

Lots of links this week, although some may already have been posted here or on the Herald blog. I like to gather them all together in categories weekly, anyway, though, in case anyone is collecting them that way.

One of the big themes this week was search engines and other search tools. Lots of mentions, especially on Gary Price's ResourceShelf, and other places. Here are some that came up:

• Feedster fast, efficient search of Weblogs and news feeds. Nice thing about it: you can sign up to use Feedster as a Web based news aggregator, giving you feeds from whatever blogs and news services with RSS you like, but can also create a feed of a Feedster search!
  
• Ay-up, another new Web search, has a caching feature, rare in search engines except for Google.
  
• Dogpile: haven't used this Web metasearch engine in awhile, but this week it got best results for me on a difficult search that I tried in many places. Check it out (it's now part of InfoSpace.)
  
• Gigablast: this reportedly fast search engine is now adding to its database, at the rate of several million documents a day.
  
• Yahoo! News Search in Beta.
  
• Topix: New news aggregator, find news by location or topic.
  
• Findory News another Web news site, but this one will customize itself for you depending on what you click on.
  
• Metrobot: search for businesses in a city. Doesn't include any Florida cities, though.....

More useful links....

Reference :

Thesaurus of refugee terms from UNHCR.

Motorcycle laws by state from AMA.

Per-Serving.org information on nutritional value of foods. Includes links to nutrient calculators.

History of Bread from the UK Bakers Federation.

10 most endangered national parks from Natl Parks Conservation Assn, lists Everglades (again) and Biscayne (new this year) among the 10.

Yale, Slavery and Abolition the university discusses its heritage, including colleges named for slaveholders....
Florida:

Search Herald obituaries: this page from Herald.com will search 365 days of obits in the Miami Herald.
Tools:

PC World: Web Stars. Annual review of best Web sites.
Journalism:

The Campaign Desk from Columbia Journalism Review, critiques campaign coverage, including blogs.
Business:

Metrobot: search for businesses in a city. Doesn't include any Florida cities, though.....

Selling Crime: report on high crime gun stores, from Americans for Gun Safety Foundation.
Statistics:

Journey to work trends, 1960-2000 in the U.S. and major metro areas, new study by DoT.

Census: Minority Links quick links to facts on ethnic populations.
Governments, Politics:

Election resources, part 3 from Gary Price.

New York Times: Campaign 2004. Quick access to recent stories, profiles.

Factiva's media visibility index tracks mentions of presidential candidates in news stories.

Ethnic Majority covers "African, Hispanic (Latino), and Asian Americans in Politics".

The Campaign Desk from Columbia Journalism Review, critiques campaign coverage, including blogs.

Bloggerstorm in Iowa: Dean campaign is pulling together coverage of the caucuses from Weblogs.

CNN's Campus Vibe: reporting political/campaign 2004 on campus. Includes a correspondent in Gainesville (UF).
News:

Yahoo! News Search in Beta.

Topix: New news aggregator, find news by location or topic.

Findory News another Web news site, but this one will customize itself for you depending on what you click on.
Public Records:

Some Federal courts will be offering transcripts online: press release for pilot project. No Florida courts included, yet.
People: no links this week.

Some Interesting stories/Weblogs:

Herbert Gans interview on Jay Rosen's Pressthink blog.

NY Observer on NYT Baghdad buro (Filkins and Sachs).

The Barrelin' Bushes Kevin Phillips takeout (book excerpt) on history of Bush family operations in the Mideast. Reprinted on Common Dreams website, no registration.

A nation wiped out: island nation of Niue, by typhoon, home of .nu Internet domain.

Bush's Mars plan: old news? See this 1988 Time cover.

Juan Cole prof at U.Michigan writes on Iraq, arab culture, news.

The Cheating Culture: Web site promoting a book by this name by David Callahan, but the site has a blog with news on cheating, and lots of background info.

Lost Among Us: great online presentation of San Bernardino Sun on mentally ill.

New Washington Post Blog: White House Briefing, by Dan Froomkin (brother of UM law prof Michael, whose blog had the link.

Cyberpolitics Blog from Cyberjournalist.

Doug Clifton's Weblog Plain Dealer editor.

Odd Blog: this is on the Oregonian Web site; this link is on a very strange mugshot.

New Yorkish: a Gawker-type blog.

Aboard the QM2: Seattle Times travel editor visits the ship in Southampton and files reports via blog.

QM2 package in Newsday, with history, slide shows, etc. and story by Orlando Sentinel cruise columnist.

The New York Times "Rage-o-Meter": measuring the hatred of the Times day-by-day.

Just a couple things:
Busy today, but have some more to add over the weekend. Meanwhile, noticed today:
No worry about Mad Cow disease here....

Cyberpolitics Blog from Cyberjournalist.

Assignment: Baghdad a local TV crew blogs from Iraq. From WISC in Madison.

Also, look at How to Save the World's post on the January 5th New Yorker article on Saudi Arabia, which is available online. Just look at the photo by Kevin Kelly posted here. It is absolutely beautiful.

More beautiful Asia photographs by Kevin Kelly here. As I suspected, this is the same Kevin Kelly of Whole Earth/Co-evolution/Cool Tools fame.

And, found on a blog by 'Leann' by doing a Technorati search on this blog's URL:

"OMG!!!! there is another person in the universe who loves research as much as i, and she actually has an official title!! "news research editor at the Miami Herald " this woman has the BEST job in the world!! does she actually get paid to do research and post it? and i thought my discovery of a real estate researcher was cool- this tops it. liz, do you need an assistant!???!!! i'm moving to miami in a month!!!"

-- Yes, Leann, there really are news researchers, and you can find out lots more about them from the News Division of the Special Libraries Association, link on the left. Most major papers, and some TV stations, networks, and magazines, have researchers/librarians. Some other news researchers blog too, see the blogroll on the Newsliblog. Unfortunately, though, I don't get paid to blog, although part of my job is finding research sources for the newsroom Intranet. And, openings for assistants are rare.
-- Liz.
(Oh, and yeah, it IS the best job in the world. Thanks for reminding me.)

Via Romenesko:
The Other War. Against the press. In Texas Monthly.

Honored:
Carl Hiaasen will get Damon Runyon award.

An editor blog!
Doug Clifton of the Plain Dealer, may be the first top editor to blog. Very impressive, even if he was 'my' editor once......(via Jeff Jarvis' Buzzmachine).

RSS:
Rather than use the Feedster URL, below, or the RSS icon links, this URL seems to work much better for RSS feed of this blog: http://feedster.com/makerss.php?url=http://newsresearch.blogspot.com. I'll make an alternative icon. I'm still not clear why the URL Feedster suggests seems to be invalid, but I may still need to tweak my template a bit. The changes Feedster suggests don't reflect the actual code in the template, so this is tricky. Amazing how all the 'easy' solutions to software/programming problems always seem to create new ones........

New and interesting today:
Ethnic Majority covers "African, Hispanic (Latino), and Asian Americans in Politics".

New Yorkish: a Gawker-type blog.

Election resources, part 3 from Gary Price, continuing this wonderful research resource.

And, The Campaign Desk from Columbia Journalism Review, critiques campaign coverage, including blogs.

Attacks on the press:
A reader, a journalist whose work I admire, was upset that I linked to the Media Research Center a couple days ago. This certainly didn't imply endorsement; rather, it seemed important to illuminate what this group does. They've hurt some good journalists. I don't condone that, at all.

Trying RSS here:
The Feedster link to RSS feed of this blog has been added to the left-hand column. URL of the feed, according to Feedster, is subscribe.feedster.com/newsresearch. I had trouble with this URL in setting up the Newsliblog feed, so try this one out. If it doesn't work you can go to Feedster and use the 'find a feed' tool (search 'newsresearch' or 'infomaniac') which will probably find another URL. I'll add that one, if necessary, and add a site search, tomorrow.

Interesting:
Topix is a Web-based news aggregator, gathering news from about 2000 news sources. You can browse over 150,000 topics or just find news by city. (via Research Buzz.)

I found Juan Cole's blog recommended by a couple sources today. He's a prof at U. Michigan and writes on Iraq, arab/mideast culture, war on terror news.

Dead Parrot Society has looked around for examples of people starting up "Adopt-a-Reporter" blogs and has found several.

South Florida's Daily Business Review reports on questioning judicial candidates on religious belief. This has been bubbling up in Florida blogs. Thanks to Hatless.com and Florida Blog for the link to this story, usually requires registration.

"City Mouse"?
These New York City folk ought to pay a visit to Brasstown if they can't recognize a plain old 'possum...

(For that matter, I could show them a lot of possums just in my back yard in Miami.....)

Better URL for Feedster feed?
I've been having lots of trouble getting the RSS for the Newslib blog to show the title and current posts. As well, I created a Feedster search form but can't get it to bring up any posts, although searching directly from the Feedster site does find them. So now I've found a different URL for the feed. Going to try using this one and see if it works everywhere: http://feedster.com/makerss.php?url=http://newslib.blogspot.com/.
If you've tried the address I posted last night (subscribe.feedster.com/newsliblog) and it's not working for you, maybe this new one will.
(Note, I did get this one to work in Amphetadesk.)

Monkey Business:
Here's something else to watch out for when you visit South Florida: picking up the rental car can be tricky.

Experimenting with RSS:
I've created an RSS feed for the Newslib weblog using Feedster's RSS generator. So far it seems to be working but have had a couple glitches (Amphetadesk wouldn't recognize it, for one). If these work out, I'll be doing this next with this blog. Here's the Newsliblog RSS URL. And if it doesn't work, maybe I'll try RSSify instead.
A nice thing about Feedster, though, is that you can also use it to create a site search that links directly to each permalink. Sweet. (I tried it with the Newsliblog feed but it needed time to scrape the new URL. Will try again tomorrow.)
Feedster can also be used as a news aggregator (for reading all these new feeds); I'm going to try that too. But I'm also tempted by Kaye Trammel's find, Bloglines. This one notifies you when a new feed appears. (Kaye also is using Feedster's search).

Help for researchers:
IRE/NICAR has posted links for help with Tanker truck accident near Baltimore.

Random:

Factiva's media visibility index tracks mentions of presidential candidates in news stories.

Best of Notable Quotables, 2003 from the Media Research Center. Such "hilarious" awards as the "Baghdad Bob award for parroting enemy propaganda", awarded to...Good Morning America.

Opedfish: a blog examining oped pages.

New Washington Post Blog: White House Briefing, by Dan Froomkin (brother of UM law prof Michael, whose blog had the link.)

Odd Blog: this is on the Oregonian Web site; this link is about a very strange mugshot.

Marino returns!
Big news for Miami. Dan Marino to head Dolphins operations.

Losses:
I keep a file of obituaries of journalists I once knew, and the additions have been piling up lately. A couple weeks ago, Stu Auerbach of the Washington Post and Miami Herald. This week, former Washington Post editorial page editor Philip Geyelin. Geyelin's loss reminds me of his colleague Meg Greenfield, gone now a couple years.
Sad to see them go.

Sunday profiles:
Adding to the Dean information (see New Yorker profile below):
The Miami Herald's Peter Wallsten reports on Dean's summer job on a Florida ranch in 1965.

"Laboring in the swamps for $1.15 an hour -- $1.25 on Sundays -- for 12 hours a day, Dean and several other teenagers worked alongside poor blacks, Mexican migrants and Cubans who had recently escaped Fidel Castro's revolution. His boss and surrogate dad for the summer was a Cuban immigrant whose son joined Dean in the fields, and Dean learned his first words of Spanish."

The Knight-Ridder series of candidate profiles features Dean today, too (Herald version here).

And, one more thing:
Fascinating article on SUVs in this week's New Yorker. The article isn't online, but there is a Q & A with the author, Malcolm Gladwell. The article's premise: SUVs, built with lower safety standards than cars or minivans, are driven by people who are less aware of the road around them, and become even more of a menace. As a driver of a small, nimble car, who feels much safer in it than in anything big (except when around SUVs, which is much too often these days), I agree thoroughly.

Also in the New Yorker: Running on Instinct, good profile of Howard Dean.

Weekend update: The weekly reference collection/research gleanings:

Two weeks' worth of links, but list is fairly short, due to holidays.

The useful links....

Reference :

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has the Iraq WMD study.

100 most misspelled words in English from yourdictionary.com.

Godchecker: "Your guide to the gods".

Encyclopedia Titanica has a database of passengers.

Google Year End Zeitgeist: recaps searches of 2003.

War Times Journal directory of Web sites on war.

Best Places to Live, 2004, from Money magazine.

Climate of 2003 report from National Climatic Data Center.

Year in Review from Infoplease. (Month by month.)

Top searches in 2003 in Yahoo.

Mad Cow USA: 1997 book.

MODIS from NASA, has 'real-time' images from space.

Eyeballing Gitmo: lots of maps and photos of the base at Guantanamo. Part of Cryptome.org, which reports on lots of sentitive places/issues.
Florida:

Find a Florida State Park.

Florida Hospital Services Guide has a searchable database of hospitals and conditions.

Plays by Zora Neal Hurston at Library of Congress.
Tools:

Alexa.com. Hadn't looked at this in a long time, but it's a useful way to get information about a Web site's popularity, etc. Here's the report on herald.com. Note chart showing hits: big spike end of Sept (Marlins?) and a couple more in July and Aug.

Wayback Machine Toolbar. Find the link on this page and drag it to your browser toolbar to easily find old versions of a Web site from The Internet Archive.
Journalism:

J-Net's top sites for journalists, 2003

Norm Solomon's P.U.Litzer awards for 2003.

Newspaper Mottoes: fun list from Loyola New Orleans.
Business:

Airline Passenger Misconduct Reports. Lots of them. This is fascinating.
Statistics:

Kids Count Census data: has regional profiles, rankings, stats on children's welfare from 2000 Census.
Governments, Politics:

FactCheck.org: from the Annenberg Center, a site analysing political bull, run by Brooks Jackson. (via PRWatch.org)

Census Facts for Features: 2004 Election. Interesting statistics.
People:

Top 50 boys and girls' names in the UK, 2003.

FreeBMD: a volunteer project entering the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales, searchable from 1837-1983 (but not complete).
News:

Opinion-Pages.org search: this site now offering searches of today's Op-Ed pages.

Washington Post Archive, 1877-1986: search PDF archive, get fulltext for $2.95 per story.
Public Records: no links this week.

Some Interesting stories/Weblogs:

Best blogs of 2003.

Big list of blog search engines.

The Charmed Life of Neil Bush in the Washington Post.

The Revealer daily review of religion and journalism from NYU.

Vitamin Q: a random listing of trivia lists.
Fun/Entertaining:

The Know-How of Knotting. Useful interactive graphic from St. Pete Times.

Penguin Warehouse: I thought this was a joke but it appears real. Penguins as pets?

BollyWhat? learn all about 'Bollywood'.

Snow Day: a refreshing Flash game.

More later:
Been blogging at that other place, and have collected a few links from this week and last which I will post in the weekly roundup tomorrow.

Where we work, part II:
More bloggers post photos of their desks. Here are South Knox Bubba's, and Presurfer's (don't see a permalink but it's the second item right now).

News about blog:
New, The Revealer, "a daily review of religion and the press", founded by by Jay Rosen and edited by Jeff Sharlet out of NYU. Rosen's essay on the launch on the Pressthink weblog. Interesting comments posted already too.

Blogging the news:
South Knox Bubba has Photos of the Bush protest today in Knoxville.....

The Spokesman Review has started a bunch of new blogs, according to this E-Media Tidbits story. This one is particularly interesting: Ask the Editors. Shouldn't every newspaper have this?

Smart thoughts on Mad Cow:
TV chef Alton Brown is updating his blog again and is making a lot of sense about how meat is produced. (Alton makes a lot of sense about a lot of things. His show is one of the few entertaining ones around.) (via Dead Parrot Society.)

Another journalist blog:
Ilind.net from Ian Lind, a journalist in Hawaii. You may remember this one from when he blogged the closing of the Star-Bulletin, his paper, in 1999-2001.

Thanks, Saddam!
"We've always had him". (From Bushflash.com. Thanks, Gil.)

Back again:
...and the Possum Drop was a bit more eventful than usual this year, what with the New York Times story and all.....but could there be a little lying going on here?

New on blogspot:
Bam Diary, a log from humanitarian workers in earthquake relief in Iran.