Weekend update: Other things found this week:

Reference :

North Carolina History and Fiction Library from the library at Eastern Carolina U. So far only covers eastern counties, but this is a very interesting project.

Omni Medical Search: a new search engine for medical topics. Searches news and images, too.

Teacher Salary Survey from American Federation of Teachers. Has data by state; here's Florida.

Adtunes.com: find out about the music used in TV ads.

EventJAR searches for cultural and entertainment events. Put in a group or artist name and get concert dates, etc.

Aircraft Type Designator Database from ICAO, get aircraft descriptions, codes, sometimes a photo.

PDHealth.mil, a guide to health issues for military and their families.

Children's Books Online.

ICasualties.org: an easier to remember URL for the Iraq Coalition Casualty Report, better than its previous address, Lunaville.org?
Governments, Politics:

Transcripts of all the DNC speeches from Boston Herald.

Gumshoe Librarian: Websites for global research issues. This is an incredible list of sites for international research, from LLRX.

9-11 Commission Report Search able version put online by AskSam.

Places Journalists Should Go for Politics: one of Al Tompkins' great guides to useful sources online. Lots of useful tips for finding unlikely things about candidates, as well as general political links (at Poynter).
Tools:

Yahoo! Search Shortcuts: Yahoo! does many of the cool searches that Google can do..and more. All listed here, with search forms.

What was the exchange rate then? historical data on the exchange rate between US dollar and other world currencies.
People:

Carl Hiaasen interview in the New York Times.
News:

NewsBot is MSNBC's answer to Google News, in beta.

Some Interesting stories/Weblogs:

TV Newser a new blog.

Rummaging.org: a new blog about those unusual auctions on EBay.

Mark Hancock Dallas MN photojournalist's blog. (via Blue Ridge Blog.)
Fun/Entertaining:

Wordcount: fascinating visual representation of word frequency. Takes over 80,000 English words and ranks them by use. Type a word and see where it is on the scale.

Did you ever hear of the cult '60s British movie, It happened here? It was about the takeover of Britain by the Nazis. Here's what the Tube map would have looked like. (Unterground).

Another thing:
It seems strange to me that with the attention right now on the Plain Dealer over the concealed weapons permit list, Doug Clifton hasn't blogged it. In fact, nothing since June 8. Guess that was a blog experiment that didn't last.

And:

I'm a librarian: song by Jonathan Rundman (via LISNews.)

News librarians in the spotlight:
Indianapolis' Michael Jesse and Chicago's Debra Bade are featured in an Online Journalism Review story about fixing errors in online archives; a really important topic and one that may not be given much attention in some newsrooms.

Public records flap:
This is really interesting. The Cleveland Plain Dealer published a list of all the concealed weapons permit holders in the area. In reaction, Ohioans for Concealed Carry posted editor Doug Clifton's home address on its website (see down the page). Fair is fair? I've always been concerned about people's interest in knowing who holds these permits. After all, only upstanding citizens are allowed to have them.

I remember this:
With the 30th anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation upcoming, some interesting things:
Several comments on Fred LaRue's death are wondering if Bob Woodward is going to tell us he was Deep Throat. No word yet. And Watergate Revisited in American Journalism Review. This looks like a really good recap which I plan to read thoroughly. (I watched the front page of the Washington Post being set in type that night, the only time I ever saw the process. I still have a line of that type, rejected for a misspelling: 'first president fo the United States to resign'.)

And:
OJR's Mark Glaser has a very interesting study of big media trying to jump on the convention blogging story.
And AJR writes about how Knight Ridder was the only news organization to get the big picture on WMDs and Iraq.
More new things on my Herald blog, including looking into Capitol Hill Blue, source of the Bush and drugs story.
The Herald's coverage of the Ricky Williams story has gotten really interesting, with Ricky telling Dan LeBatard that his marijuana use is good for him and more important than football. Dan had a wonderful column yesterday about the disconcerting position he's in writing these stories about a friend. I can't get the exact link since KR Digital's registration system seems to have gone bloooey again.
Memo to KR Digital: PLEASE GET RID OF THE DAMN REGISTRATION!

...and another thing:
For anyone who's interested in happenings at the News Division Awards Dinner in Nashville in June, quite a few photos have been posted on the Park Library site at UNC.

Active Postings:
...on the other blog, lots of stuff today, mostly political. Links to convention bloggers, etc.
Of note: that blog was linked from the front page of Herald.com today, first time in a long time. Very nice!

Weekend update: Other things found this week:
Politics dominates this week, of course. Many of these links have already been posted to the Herald blog, but are repeated here for reference purposes.

More links....

Reference :

Oxymoron Dictionary

SchoolResults.org get comparative test result by state.
Governments, Politics:

9-11 Report from National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

9-11 Report: search and cluster: Vivisimo search engine makes it easy to find stuff within the report. Also:

The executive summary, in HTML created by Jason Kottke.

Inexcusable Failure: report on the training of Iraqi security forces, from Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Official DNC blog.

Democratic National Convention Guide, Boston '04

Feedster Politics: Feedster offers links to all the blogs from the DNC.

Convention Bloggers: a community site.

Librarian.net DNC Blog; Jessamyn West, a prominent librarian blogger, has credentials to the DNC next week. She's writing about it in this blog.

Electoral Vote Predictor: predictions based on polls. Shows Kerry way ahead.

Real Clear Politics is tracking all the polls.

TRAC study of immigration enforcement

Don't believe Michael Moore? Here's his factchecking on the statements in the movie.

Catholic? KerryWatch is monitoring the criticisms of Kerry on religious grounds.

Now here's an unusual political campaign: Outraged Moderates. They've started a campaign called Download for Democracy, encouraging citizens to gather government memos, documents, and communications to make them available to all. Here's what they've gathered so far. (via The Guardian.)
Statistics:

National Jewish Population Survey covers 2000-2001 population.
Journalism:

Technology and the newsroom: presentation by Jeff Jarvis to The Aspen Institute.

"Sad decline of the news business", column in Ad Age.

Sports Shooter a site for sports photographers. Has an article on the NFL photo library.

Reportage: archive online magazine of photojournalism, great photos from around the world, including some great photos of a rural mountain village in Cuba.
Tools:

Better WHOIS: find owner of a domain name. This one searches ALL domain registrars, it claims.

New Vivismo form also lets you search news, individual papers, lots of other Web sites, by clicking on the pulldown menu.

Search the Web
--------------
Search Top News
Business News
Tech News
Sports News
--------------

Delphion
FirstGov
PubMed@NIH
USDA
eBay
--------------
Looksmart
Lycos
MSN

Netscape
Open Directory
Wisenut
Looksmart#jnj
MSN#jnj
Netscape#jnj
BBC
LII
--------------

BBCNews
CBC
CNN
New York Times
PBS
USAToday
UnionTribune
Washington Post
YahooBizNews

YahooNews
YahooSportNews
BBCNews#jnj
CNN#jnj
Reuters#jnj
USAToday#jnj
Washington Post
YahooNews#jnj

Excel ate my DNA: scary story about relying on Excel as a database tool (at least the later versions).
People:

Alexander Hamilton: the man who made modern America, exhibit from The Museum of New York.

Jimmy Carter's presidential diaries, online at the Carter Library.

Doonesbury goes to war: a interview with Garry Trudeau in Rolling Stone.

Anyone remember JFK satirist Vaughn Meader? He's living in Gulfport, Fla and reminiscing about his hit 1962 album, The First Family.
Public Records, Florida, Business, News: no links this week.

Some Interesting stories/Weblogs:

We the Media: Blog accompanying Dan Gillmor's new book on Grassroots Journalism.

This is Rumor Control" "News and analysis on the appalling mess we're in".

Sudan: Passion of the Present a blog on news and activism.

Hating America: an opinion from Europe, in Hudson Review.

Why Farenheit 9/11 didn't end with "We Won't be Fooled Again", according to Pete Townshend. In The Guardian.

Looking for music online? MP3 blogs aggregator finds links to music from blogs.

Funfurde: a gadget review blog. (I want that Aga, British racing green.)
Fun/Entertaining:

This land...great political parody, Flash with music.

Wear Yellow: buy a yellow wristband to support the Lance Armstrong Foundation (sponsored by Nike).

Story of a very expensive mistake in choosing a vanity tag, from Snopes.

Real life fiction:
The Miami Herald reports a man gone overboard from a cruise ship approaching Port of Miami. Eerily similar to circumstances (time, place) of the opening of Carl Hiaasen's new book, Skinny Dip.
And they say the stories about South Florida are too crazy to be true.

Otherblogging:
Lots on the Herald blog, including following the 'Terror in the Skies' story, Jimmy Buffett, Convention links, and the 9/11 report, as well as the Nixon house story.

Discovering blogging:
A writer for the paper in Coeur d'Alene, discovered blogs when a reader commented on a column of hers he'd read on one. Keep your eyes open for the blog, By Sholeh Patrick. I really like the conclusion:

"Maybe blogging is more social interaction than anything. We can get information anywhere these days, and absorb it all to our heart's content. But in a day when neighbors no longer sit outside in the evenings to chat about life, perhaps blogging is becoming the new porch swing. It's just a bigger porch."

'Mr. Google'?
Fascinating ongoing discussions over the last week or so after an article called 'Terror in the Skies -- Again' in Womenswallstreet.com. I've linked to the article and discussions a few times in last week on my other blog. But today a fun look by someone who actually tried to find the facts, in an article in National Review (via Sheila Lennon). I was most intrigued, though, by one line in the National Review story:

...There aren't that many casinos in southern California, so I had my research assistant, Mr. Google, take a look at some. An hour later I was talking to the nice folks at Sycuan Casino & Resort, near San Diego....

'My research assistant'? Have we really been supplanted?

Short Memory:
So here's how things go in Miami: Today The Herald reports that Richard Nixon's 'Winter White House' on Key Biscayne has been torn down. No fanfare, no discussion. Just a pile of rubble. History doesn't last long here.

The history we do celebrate? Oh, things like the 20th Anniversary of Miami Vice. (Hard to believe.) That's about how long our memories are good for.

Beautiful light in downtown Miami tonight....after a hard rain. 

A happy resident... 

More blogging news:
I've discovered a great source for news about blogs and blogging: Topix has a 'blogs' category, and there's all sorts of stuff here.
I really like Topix (main page) as a news source. It finds news from local sources all over the country, and you can easily browse news by city, or even search for news from a small town. If the town is really small it retrieves news from about a 25-mile radius. Or you can get news on a celebrity, or a general topic.
Once you've browsed a topic or place, it stays on your main page as a link (at least in IE). Each page also has an RSS or Atom Feed so you can always have this blog news in your aggregator....or any other topic you want.

Weekend update: Other things found this week:
Just in time for hurricane season, this new site from NOAA: Historical Hurricane Tracks from NOAA's Coastal Services Center, also has a population mapping program and access to forecasts back to 1988. Also lets you extract historical tracks in GIS format.

Two of South Florida's best investigative reporters have left: Daily Business Review story on Fred Schulte/Jenni Bergal leaving Sun-Sentinel; and Public records aces Schulte and Bergal leave mark on Florida; tribute on Joe Adams' Web site with highlights of their great stories.

More links....

Reference :

Foundation Center's PubHub has reports produced by foundations, searchable/browseable.

Teacher salaries stagnant as health insurance costs soar, report from American Federation of Teachers.

Economic Commission of the States: report on No Child Left Behind implementation.

Economic Freedom of the World, 2004, from Cato Institute.

The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, searchable.

The Butler Report: the UK report on WMDs and intelligence.

Footnotes to History, on forgotten nations.

Hate on Display: a visual dictionary of extremist symbols, logos and tattoos. From Anti-Defamation League.

Cricket 365 everything you'd want to know.

Battle of Britain: official history site from RAF.

The New Great Migration, Black Americans' return to the South, new report from Brookings Inst.
Governments, Politics:

The electoral college, political parties, and elections: Sites to help you through the voting process, good directory from Assn of College and Research Libraries.

Congressional Hearings now online on GPO site, from 105th congress (1997-98) on. (Or search on this page.)

Your Tax Dollars At Work…Offshore: How Foreign Outsourcing Firms Are Capturing State Government Contracts: report from Washtech. Lists several offshoring companies with Florida contracts, including $12.5 for a Food Stamp EBT call center.
Business:

Airline pilot pay: pilots' site with info on salaries, pension plans, etc. by airline.

Longer Hours, less pay: apparently the change in overtime rules has not gone away. This study by Economic Policy Institute reportedly says the administration has ignored protests about original rules proposal and is putting them through.
News:

News.com: Extra current tech news from blogs and other sources.

New York Times RSS feeds: get the news delivered to your news aggregator, like My Yahoo.
Statistics:

Facts for Hispanic Heritage Month from Census.

Interactive Tariff and Trade DataWeb, stats from U.S. International Trade Commission.

School District Analysis Program from DoE, get stats on districts by ethnicity, other demographics.

Contraception Counts: data by state and congressional district, on pregnancy and contraception.
Public Records:

Utah Driving records now online. The request page.
Journalism:

News Audiences Increasingly Politicized, new report from Pew Center.

Nice Poynter story about a reunion of old Atlanta Journal sports staff.
Florida, Tools,People: no links this week.

Some Interesting stories/Weblogs:

"Bad" Catholics: a report by Mother Jones.

Pew Internet report: Web users go online looking for things not found in mainstream media, like graphic war images.

Voter-purge decision could haunt Jeb Bush: Matt Doig's analysis shows different election result with purged felons returned to voting list.

Stuck in the Ditch: Charleston paper report says Corps of Engineers is letting Intracoastal Waterway deteriorate.

Think 'F9/11's a big deal? You don't remember 'Millhouse'. in Slate.

Guantanamo loses its 'Least Worst Place' slogan as announced by 'Lt. Mike Kafka'. ("Yes, you're reading that correctly. A man named Kafka has been deployed to field questions about a prison where the criminals are only vaguely charged with crimes, can't speak to lawyers and likely will never get out."). From The Register.
Fun/Entertaining:

America's Byways: a guide to scenic roads. From U.S. DoT.

Road Trip, USA; has features on several great long road trips, like Coastal USA (Atlantic City -- Key West).

Roadside America: guide to quirky attractions.

Only in Manhattan: A place to take naps, in the Empire State Building.

Spicy Cooking: 'hot equals health'.

Alice's Adventure Underground: images of the original Lewis Carrol manuscript, with beautiful drawings.

Blog news:
Blogger has made a bunch of changes, including a new editing module that lets you post in WISIWYG format, with new possibilities like uploading an image, making bulleted lists, etc. without knowing HTML. Very cool. However, since yesterday I've been having trouble getting posts to publish....maybe something to do with the new update?
And this is cool, too. Now that Google owns Picasa, you can get their photo management software for free. Since I've been using their Hello! product to post photos via Bloggerbot, I've been tempted to purchase the software. Now I'll definitely try it.

The blog has been freed!:
An alert reader pointed out that my Herald blog seems to now be accessible without registration at Herald.com. It's hard for me to test, since I've logged on at most PCs I use, but I just tried it at a computer that asked me for registration when I clicked on another story, and it came up. Of course, Herald.com's strategy is to let you get one story, then ask for registration the next one. So I'm not sure. If so, great. I haven't heard as much from KR Digital.....

More public records activity:
It's been posted elsewhere, including a message to NewsLib from Gary Price, but it's very interesting news: Elsevier, owner of LexisNexis, buys Accurint (parent company Seisint also is producer of the Matrix database). This story is from FT; more news in South Florida papers tomorrow (Seisint is based in Boca Raton).

Inside scoop:
Ever wonder why New York Times stories (and other papers, too) don't show up much in Google searches? Here's Searching for the New York Times, a fascinating piece in Wired on why NYT stories come up so rarely in Google (it's because of their Nexis contract, which makes them the bulk of their $25 million NYT Digital profit). (via Boing Boing.)

Blog fever:
Lots and lots of stuff happening in the blog/photoblog/RSS field. Google and Yahoo are both doing some interesting stuff. Google is buying Picasa, the company that created Bloggerbot, the photo uploading software for blogs, under the Hello! brand. Picasa is also a photo organizing software. An interesting expansion for Google.
Yahoo!, on the other hand, has bought a company called Outpost, which does an email/RSS reader. Since My Yahoo has been offering their online feed reader, this can only enhance what they do.
Also, some interesting new stuff at Feedburner, which can improve indexing of your blog, convert your feed so it's compatible with several feed formats, and now offers a neat animated banner showing your last 5 feed headlines.


All interesting fodder for more discussion of how blogs, feeds and instant photo display is changing and will continue to change how people get their news.

More news:
I didn't get to post a weekend update this weekend, although I'd already posted much of what I found interesting last week, here or on the Herald blog. A few more things:

Gene Weingarten has questions for Bush and Kerry. (via Michael Froomkin.)

Kerry-Edwards links compiled by Poynter's Al Tompkins.

The Living Room Candidate: TV ads from Eisenhower to ?

Techpolitics is compiling voter registration data, including lots of state reports: Florida data includes Miami-Dade precinct maps, lots lots more.

VIN decoder: put in a car's VIN number and find out where it was built, type of car, etc. Here's an explanation of VIN numbers. (via Gary Price.)

Senate Intelligence Report, scanned and OCR'd so it's searchable, by Simson Garfinkle at MIT. How it works.)

A hot topic:
More on the question of how journalists will use RSS and other news feeds: RSS transcends the clutter of the inbox, special report in PR Week. (via Dave Winer.)

More on that Feeds topic:
In a perfect segue from the discussion on Newslib-L this morning, Steve Rubel points to Dan Gillmor's new ideas about how PR folks should get their message out: RSS/feeds, not email. I don't know if news librarians should be the ones to promote feeds in the newsroom, but someone needs to. Journalists take note. Some good links on Rubel's post.

Research alert!:
Here's a story about a new magazine that really, really needs a researcher (or several). Don't miss the kicker.

Firefox help:
I've noticed that sometimes pages load slower on Firefox. Apparently there's a solution. Looks pretty simple, although I haven't tried it yet. Thanks to Susan at EBC for the link. (That's Easy Bake Coven, a great blog name.....)

Blog wisdom:
Some discussion of RSS/news feeds today on the NewsLib listserv. It's still hard to sell feeds' potential for journalists, although it's becoming more and more obvious. Here's a great new report from Blogger: The Wisdom of Blogs. Working off the new book on the wisdom of crowds, this article points out how blogs and feeds can create or strengthen knowledge. Very nice.

On and on...
Still having trouble getting Blogspot blogs to open. Seems sporadic though.

Some things of interest today:

The Lexington Herald report on how they failed to cover Civil Rights in the '60s.

OB4.org (for Of the people, by the people, for.....etc.), a new blog about politics and the Internet.

Michael Moore's brand new Weblog.

The Rest is Noise: a blog from New Yorker music critic Alex Ross.

I posted several Kerry/Edwards links to the Herald blog, including this good links compilation from Poynter's Al Tompkins.

Addendum:
Have found one small glitch with the Firefox browser: it won't run Factiva. You get an error message saying 'You are not using a Factiva-approved browser'. Not good to be so rigid, guys.......

Black Point marina. 

Poinciana is still brilliant. 

Holiday chaos at the boat ramp. this is one reason we don't boat anymore.... 

Words of Wisdom:
Happy holiday, for all of you who actually do get the day off today. For some worthwhile reading while we've got the time, could do much worse than to read Molly Ivins' column today. Reminds us that we're really good people at heart, despite our problems.....
And I am still thinking about Leonard Pitts' column from Friday, about how angry we are these days; this one took my breath away. Think about that anger, then read Molly again.
I also really enjoyed this Ivins column from last week on at least one source of that anger, religion in politics. Thanks to Lynne for reminding me of this one....
And last, Joe Galloway today reprints a letter from a soldier that says it all.
(The links to to stories on the Miami Herald Web site. Sorry that registration is required, as it probably will be to any versions on other Knight Ridder sites. At least the Ivins columns may show up on other non-registration papers......)

Weekend update: Other things found this week:
FYI, after reading all the horror tales about Internet Explorer, I've decided to switch to Firefox from Mozilla. I like it. Of all the alternative browsers I've tried (but not quite adopted), this one seems to get it right. Tabbed browsing inside one browser really works. And managing popups is a cinch. So far so good....

A couple books I've read over the last week or so seem to fit right in to the 4th of July theme:
The Mammoth Cheese, by Sherri Holman, recaps the tale of the giant cheese once made in Cheshire, Mass. for Thomas Jefferson. In this modern-day story, a struggling Virginia dairy farmer and cheesemaker whose farm hand is a Jefferson interpreter, finds her desperate hope for help from a politician leads her to a nearly impossible quest: create another mammoth cheese and deliver it to her hoped-for savior in the White House, while dealing with a rebellious teenage daughter (whose revolutionary teacher encourages her). There's lots more to the story, which gets to the heart of small town life. It's a wonderful tale of rural America.
A story about the original cheese (1802).

Charlie Wilson's War, a book by '60 minutes' producer George Crile, who traveled often with the former Texas congressman, is the story about how a single legislator, with the help of a CIA officer, used back channels to fund massive support for the Muhajidin in Afghanistan to repulse the Soviet invasion. Strange history, and a bit disconcerting in retrospect. Where are all those weapons we funneled to Islam fundamentalists now? And how many more of these rogue operations have been going on over the years?

The links....

Reference :

Why is a colonel called 'kernel'? explanation to understanding military rank from Naval Historical Center.

American Indian Health from Natl Library of Medicine.

The safety impact of vehicle-related road debris, study by AAA Foundation. Pretty relevant in S. Florida.

PubMedCentral has free searchable medical journals. Now some journals go back 150 years!

Atlanta Time Machine uses old/new photos of places to show change. This would be a good project for Miami.

How modern terrorism uses the Internet. Study from U.S. Institute for Peace.

The Jewish Encyclopedia: entire 12-volume set from 1906.

Homicide in Chicago, 1870-1930 from NWU, has a downloadable database of all the homicides and special reports on 25.

Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at American U., tracks trafficking in persons, money laundering, etc.
Governments, Politics:

State and Local government on the Net: guide to finding Web sites, with a Weblog to announce new sites.
Tools:

Want to keep your home computer free of Gremlins? Slate tells you how.
People:

More terrorist lists: World Bank list of Ineligible Firms; Bank of England financial sanctions; Canadian lists of terrorist names
Business:

Job Watch Economic Policy Institute is trying to keep track of job loss/creation.
News:

Al Ahram Special: Iraq turnover the Egyptian weekly has coverage from Iraqi journalists and intellectuals.
Statistics:

Do Not Call registrations, complaints statistics at first anniversary of the registry.

Facts about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from Census.
Florida:

Florida Charts track communities' health and demographics (by Census tracts, 2000 data) indicators.
Public Records, Journalism: no links this week

Some Interesting stories/Weblogs:

BBC blogger Stuart Hughes, who lost a leg in Iraq last year and was the first of any news media to report the handover on Monday, covers the Saddam hearing (from London). How he got the handover story

Amazing sight.... 

Night blooming cactus 

Today's fun:
People for the American Way has put the Florida Felon list online. Joe adams compiled lots of stories on the felons list. The Herald Ran the names against the clemency list and found lots of people who can vote on the list of banned voters.

Into the Blogosphere: a collection of academic essays on blogs from University of Minnesota, where all faculty, staff and students get free blogs.

Jessica Baumgart has fixed the Feedster feed on NewsliBlog, and added another from Feedburner (which looks to be an Atom Feed).

Blogger is doing its 'lost blog' thing again. Hope it doesn't last too long......