New blog host:

Steve Rubel points to a new blogging host/editor/tool that looks pretty good, he says: Eponym. It's free and will transfer your old blog to the new platform if you like. Features include categories, links to recent comments, and a 'Cosmos' (Technorati links).
Rubel created a sample blog so you can see what it looks like. Here's another new Eponym blog, Portal News, which seems to be news about Israel in Portuguese, with a pleasing design.
This could be a good option for someone who wants something that does a bit more than Blogger but without cost.
There's also an Eponym Blog Search.

Bit of a warning, though: One new Eponym blogger is finding it rather hard to use.

Content blog:

I've seen a couple links in last couple days to the blog by Ken Doctor, Content Bridges, especially to his posting 10 Questions for (McClatchy CEO) Gary Pruitt, and the followup, More (Web-Oriented) Questions for Pruitt.

Good to see Doctor's blog. As a (now former) Knight Ridder VP who was involved with building KR New Media, then KR Digital, he has a lot of background in new media (starting with the Pioneer Planet several years ago when he was Pioneer Press's managing editor). I found him thoughtful and a great listener.

This blog is definitely worth reading on the Knight Ridder story and online news media in general.

Down several posts, Doctor's reaction to Tony Ridder's 'shock' that McClatchy would sell off some of the papers:

I have no doubt that Tony is anguished and surprised. But isn't this the fit epitaph for a once-great company, now in the throes of dismemberment, a company that has had such inability to sweat the details and execute:

TOO
LITTLE
TOO
LATE

Weekend update: Other things found last week:


Continuing the discussion over newspaper blogs and whether bloggers should be paid or are independent enough, Bob Norman's The Daily Pulp, blogging South Florida media, has moved to the New Times Broward/Palm Beach Website, where Norman works. Several of his readers are unhappy, especially those who have been asked to register. I don't remember ever registering there and I get in fine.
It seems this discussion will never go away. Online newspapers continue to frustrate readers, no matter what they do.

The other links:

Reference:

NTSB Reports Increase In Aviation Accidents In 2005

Drunk Driving, a guide for police from U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community-Oriented Policing Services.

National Drug Threat Assessment 2006 from DoJ.

Terrorist Organizations, profiles, data, news from Council of Foreign Relations. Also: Terrorist Leaders.

Status of the Nation's Highways, Bridges, and Transit:
2004 Conditions and Performance latest stats from DoT.

Deadly Virus: National Archives on the flu epidemic of 1918.

AmphibiaWeb for reference resources on amphibians.

Governments, Politics:

OpentheGovernment.org.

FreedomInfo.org: international directory of Freedom of Information organizations, news, discussion.

Statutes at Large from GPO, this is laws that have been enacted, final version. So far just 108th Congress available.

Essembly, a 'social networking' site for politics and community organizing. Need to register but the idea sounds interesting....

ABC of Diplomacy: useful glossary from Swiss govt.

State Occupational Licensing Boards: directory from BRB links directly to searches by state.

National Archives: State Department Cables, 1973-4: search records and get PDFs of documents. This file will be expanded.

Business:

Google Finance.

Macraes Blue Book is a directory of industrial products linking to Yellow Pages entries on companies that make/sell them.

Statistics:

Best Performing Cities 2005: Where America's Jobs Are Created and Sustained, study from Milken Institute. Several Florida cites rank high on this rating by job creation/growth, including Ft. Lauderdale area, 9th. (Miami is 73d.)

SITA report on airlines and missing baggage (PDF).

Growth of Hispanic Business, report from Census.

Tools:

Street Names Lookup from MelissaData, put in a ZIP code and get list of streets with link to map. Or search a street name.

Florida:

Florida Historical Quarterly, searchable all editions thru 1993. Note link at bottom of result to PDF.

Some interesting stories/blogs:

Red-hot spots of 2005: Palm Beach Post continues mapping the real estate boom.

After Wilma, a blog from Cancun.

Miami Herald blogs:

In an interesting turn of events a local Miami blog, Critical Miami, analyses The Herald's lineup of blogs. (Thanks to Alesh for being nice to me.)
The Herald has added several new blogs recently, so it's starting to attract attention.

Note there is some discussion in the comments about why reporters should bother blogging in the first place, or why anyone would read them. And questions about whether the newspaper bloggers are paid for the work.

Feeders:

I got an email the other day from a reader who said my feed no longer worked. I was embarassed to say I hadn't thought about the feed in a long time, and discovered I no longer even had a link in the left hand column.

I set up a Feedburner (Feedster?) feed a couple years back, but it worked sporadically and then didn't work at all. I left the link on the page, and added a link to an Atom feed once Blogger started offering it. But when I edited the template a few months ago, I deleted links to both feeds, the one that worked and the one that didn't.

So now the link is back, top of the lefthand column. http://newsresearch.blogspot.com/atom.xml.
The reader checked the feed in two validation sites, http://www.xml.com/cgi-bin/checker/checker and http://feedvalidator.org/, so it should work for everyone, despite being Atom not RSS.

On this topic, a relevant post from Sheila Lennon, who feels the same way I do about feeds. She quotes Jeneane Sessum, who says, in Lazy Aggregator Readers Go Home, that readers miss the point of conversation with a blog. She asks her readers to come to her page, comment and interact. Sheila comments on Jeneane's blog:

I like returning to familiar sites, I guess, seeing what you're all up to. Making my rounds is a comfortingly familiar routine to start and end the day.

Me too. I tried three or four feed readers, starting with Amphetadesk and moving on thru several more. I do have quite a few feeds in My Yahoo! and check that once a week or so to see if I've missed anything. Lately I've thought about setting up Google Reader or the reader in Firefox. But I just can't enthuse about this. Like Sheila, I like to browse, see if the site has changed any, blogroll has been added to, etc. I just click on my blogroll links and have a regular routine...some blogs every day, some every other day or so, some once a week. Works for me.

(Added later:) And, another thought: when I edit the posting, as I've done with this one, do people who read this only in feeds get the updates? I'm really bad about going back to change things after I post them. I think of something else I meant to say, or realize I've spelled something wrong (Sessum, not Sessums). Hmmm...

Researcher, blogger:

A message to NewsLib and a posting on Resourceshelf reveal that researcher Julie Domel at the San Antonio Express News has a blog on the MySA site, Ask the Researcher.

The posts are a combination of postings about useful information sources or topics in the news, plus answers to readers about the newspaper or about the news. I really like this.

A newspaper man:

I really like this post by Doug Thompson on the life of a newspaperman. Thompson says:

"...a journalist is an unemployed newspaperman." I’m not a journalist. I’m a newspaperman. Always have been (even with not working as one) and always will be.
...Home is not only where the heart is. It is also where real news is found.

Thompson, retired from his previous journalism careers, still maintains his Capitol Hill Blue news site and his Blue Ridge Muse blog, and now is reporting and shooting for his home town newspaper, where he's 'retired'. Once a newspaperman, always a newspaperman. Or woman.

Useful:

Via Sheila Lennon, a great guide to using Gmail from Life Hacker. Gotta try some of these....

When is blogging relevant?

Great discussion going on about the Washington Post's new Red America blog. Media Matters for America has sent a letter to Washingtonpost.com editor James Brady saying that putting in a political operator to write a political blog with a conservative slant does not balance out the perceived liberal blogging of a veteran journalist like Dan Froomkin.

Reaction in several places, many linked on Memeorandum, like this from Talking Points Memo ( and this from Froomkin's brother Michael in Miami).

(And, doesn't it still ring strangely to describe conservatives as 'red'? Does no one remember the Cold War?)

Organizing your news:

I need all the help I can get in figuring out which news gathering/organizing/webfeed readers to use. So this is the third post on this topic in a few days, but the more information the better, I say:

Mark Glaser, of NPR's Mediashift blog, has this Guide to Personalized News Sites. It reminds us that people have been trying to come up with the ultimate news delivery system for a long time. Remember Fishwrap? And, what was that thing Knight Ridder bought in the early '90s? (Not as far back as Viewtron, however.)

Glaser's column discusses some different sources for news filtering than the others I linked to earlier.

Blogging for Free:

Good discussion from Steven Baker on Business Week's Blogspotting blog about whether journalists should contribute a blog to a profitmaking website without compensation.

Baker is on leave and still blogging, without pay but with health insurance. Washington Post bloggers are not paid for blogging unless they spend lots of time at it (but have salaries). Blogging is so much fun lots of people do it for free. But should they, when it's on a site that makes money? Some interesting comments here. (This is a topic I'll be talking about more in a few weeks.)

Goodbye, Ace:

Sometimes it seems my job here is to remember old Washington Post colleagues who die. Most of the people at the Post now may not remember these folks. (Because about half of them worked at the Miami Herald when I was there.)

So, here's to Bill Brady, a genuine newspaper man of the old school, night editor, harasser of new reporters, copy staff and librarians, a man who called everyone -- especially those young reporters -- "Ace". There are dozens of stories about Brady. I wish the wedding story was online somewhere, it's the best. But the obit gets a lot of them, like this one:

He was on duty when a news desk colleague dropped dead and was carried out of the newsroom on a stretcher. Mr. Brady leaned over to a friend, saying, "He let it get to him, Ace."

(Added later:) Speaking of old newspaper folks, I just love this story in the News & Observer about the old Raleigh Times....they've converted the old newspaper building to a restaurant and bar! How fitting!

Future of newspapers:

There's a discussion not to be missed on Jay Rosen's PressThink, Twelve newspapers in a state of nature, about what will happen to the 12 papers that McClathy plans to sell after they acquire Knight Ridder newspapers.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if they could be acquired by local investors who would run them as community resources? Can the Save the Merc campaign find a buyer in San Jose? Lots of discussion on the PressThink story, with links to columns and bloggers, and comments from readers.

This is a wonderful conversation about how newspapers might be able to evolve, and is attracting even more interesting comments, such as this from Lex Alexander.

There's also a flurry of discussion about the future of the Washington Post, where the online operation is attracting lots of attention. In this Washington City Paper story, most linkers are noting that some WP bloggers are paid, and not others. But there's more here, including comments from Editor Len Downie, hinting at major changes in how newspapering is looked at anywhere:

All this media diversification has left some staffers wondering where the emphasis falls—on the print product? The Web? Radio? One Post employee put this very question last week to Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. in a staff meeting. The paper’s top gun responded that the Post needed to become “platform-agnostic.”

City Paper's reaction: "When your 63-year-old editor starts sounding like Esther Dyson, you know your newsroom is changing. "

Another new search engine:

Seems there's a new one so often that I rarely link to them. But once in awhile one seems worth looking closer at.

This happened a couple of weeks ago with Exalead, which was highly recommended by Gary Price, and I found it came up with some things I hadn't found elsewhere, as well as allowing proximity searching, clustering, and sorting.

So a couple days ago I got an email from the folks at Accoona, who suggested I take a look at their search engine.

This one is different. It specializes in searching News and Business sources, although it also has a Web search. At the time I was interested in Web searches and found several things for a project I'm working on that hadn't come up anywhere else. I tried the same search in News, and actually found some news stories related to my obscure topic too.

According to the Accoona email, "The engines are built on artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms which enable retrieval of more results for stories associated with the search term and not just containing the term." and "you can further refine search results using on-screen scroll-down menus, including "people mentioned," "date published," and "publisher," among others. The menus reveal the number of times each choice is mentioned in the results."

This one certainly seems worth adding to the tools list.

Weekend update: Other things found last week:


A good week for new resources, in nearly every category.
It was an especially bountiful week for researchers looking for source documents on Iraq and the middle east, with these major releases (as well as the National Security Strategy, listed below under Government):

• Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents posted at Foreign Military Studies Office
  Joint Reserve Intelligence Center.
  
• Reports from the State Dept's Future of Iraq project at the Memory Hole.
  
• Arab Cultural Awareness: 58 Factsheets from U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (via Federation of American Scientists).
  
• The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy Study from Kennedy School.

The other links:

Reference:

Recently Released, Report on Activities to Combat Human Trafficking, Fiscal Years 2001-2005 from DoJ.

The Repopulation of New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina from RAND Corp.

Links to NCAA rulebooks from Docuticker.

Hurricane strike forecast for 2006

National Hurricane Center and the liklihood of hurricanes: statistical analysis from The Oil Drum, with lots of comments.

Governments, Politics:

Federal Court Caseload in 2005

National Security Strategy, 2006, from White House.

Journalism:

The State of the News Media 2006 from Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Internet Resources: journalism; nice collection from American Library Assn.

SavetheMerc.com: local grassroots movement to keep the Mercury News in San Jose.

News:

Polls show anti-Islam bias in U.S.; two polls from Council on American-Islamic Relations.

New in Nexis: Vogue and Allure.

Business:

Annual Reports for Investors: free service has 10ks and annual reports in PDF.

Securities Class Action Clearinghouse at Stanford, search database of filings, settlements, decisions.

Public Records:

Finding (Almost) anybody: nice guide to using public records from FIU prof Neil Reisner.

Finding and Using Public Records: a guide from American Library Assn.

Construction Weblinks: Public Records Guide. Guide to public records for business, lots of good links here to company searches, lots more.

PACER now has Written Opinions for no extra charge.

Statistics:

100 Fastest Growing Counties in the U.S. from Census.

State and Regional Employment, annual survey from BLS.

Diversity Spreads Out: Metropolitan Shifts in Hispanic, Asian, and Black Populations Since 2000 from Brookings.

Who Uses Information Technology Services? A Demographic Analysis of American Consumers

SIPRI Yearbook 2005, pocket edition (36-page pdf) on armaments, arms sales, etc.

Voting and Registration in the 2004 Election, stats from Census.

IRS 2005 Databook, latest tax stats.

State of the World's Children 2006 from UNICEF. Lots of stats.

Tools:

TravMatrix gives you driving directions with information about each highway exit. Need to find a Comfort Inn or a Pizza Hut? Ask it.

Florida:

Florida's Tax Law is now all searchable using AskSam.

Charting The Course: Where is South Florida Heading? report from Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions at FAU, online on Sun-Sentinel site (PDF).

Some interesting stories/blogs:

Daily Perspective, a blog from Heritage Microfilm highlighting stories from newspapers' archives.

Guided by History, a blog from Wells Fargo covering the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake.

Associated Industries of Florida is Blogging the 2006 legislative session.

We Smirch, new celebrity gossip news and blog scanner from Memeorandum.

The Media Stock Blog.

More on news organizers

Nice post on Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools site about what he calls Consensus Web Filters. Pretty good descriptive name, I'd say. He describes all the sites from Digg to Newsvine to Furl, and lots more I've never even heard of. Worth a look.

White Knights:

The American Journalism Review's article on the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau is up and it's really revealing. This organization has broken major stories over the last couple years and does great work. Some KR journalists are worried about what will happen to this bureau as McClatchy takes over and bureau chief Clark Hoyt moves into a consultant role, at least one journalist has already announced a departure, and columnist/military expert Joe Galloway has decided to retire, so it's nice to see the group lauded:

Hoyt's people are out there every day competing against the big boys, and it is impressive how often they get good stories first, and get them right. Pound for pound, they might be the most seriously aggressive bunch of journalists in Washington.

Even KR bureau researcher/Web editor Tish Wells is quoted here, several times:

Wells says the bloggers "started to do an orchestrated campaign. We kept getting letters and e-mails: 'Why didn't the mainstream media do anything on this?' (the Downing Street memo story) And we sat there and wrote very patiently back to each one of them: 'We did do this, and here is the link to it on our Web site.'"

From the piece, a hope that the bureau's great work will be continued under McClatchy: "...McClatchy acquires the Washington operation with enormous admiration and respect for the work that has gone on here..."

News Finders:

I'm finding it hard to keep up with the new automated news/newsfeed categorizers lately. I just haven't gotten Digg at all (the front page stories are so geeky), find Newsvine a bit intimidating (but am liking it more everytime I look at it), but love Memeorandum and Topix.

So I found this article very useful (thanks to fellow news researcher Jean Packard): Man vs. Machine in Newsreader War, in Wired.

It discusses these and other news organizers (wow, had no idea there were so many) and makes it all quite clear.

And while nobody thinks Digg is going to disappear any time soon, the smart money is on automated news readers soundly defeating human filters in the years to come.
...What Google developed wasn't artificial intelligence, but something closer to what O'Reilly Media tech guru Rael Dornfest calls "artificial artificial intelligence".
That's the brand of technology most likely to win this race: not the machines we use, but the machines that know how to use us.

And, in another very different version of news categorization, even more new stuff from Heritage Microfilm's NewspaperArchives.com: College Basketball Newspaper Archive and Pro Baseball Archives.

Blog worth:

I just had to try this after seeing it mentioned on Jessica Baumgart's blog:

My blog is worth $59,276.70.
How much is your blog worth?

Find out how much your blog is worth here.

Heritage:

Over the years the mention of Heritage Microfilm on the NewsLib discussion group has always seemed to raise a debate. They have managed, however, to put a lot of newspapers' archives on microfilm, and are doing some great things with the online archives, making historical information available for free (see recent links to MLK, Titanic and Winter Games archives, for example).
Now here's something else interesting: a Heritage employee, 'Liz', has created a new blog, Daily Perspective, in which each day a news story from the archives is highlighted. Today's story from this day in history: JFK's body moved to Arlington National Cemetery, from the Herald Journal in Syracuse.

There are also links here to the free online news archives.

Blaming the Internet:

The Chicago Tribune's fascinating investigation, using online databases, of CIA employees, is called Internet Blows CIA Cover. Whew! This will probably raise a ruckus. From researchers, so far, a comment from Gary Price on Resourceshelf; I'm sure there will be more.

First off, I do love the story. It is still amazing, despite recent privacy limitations, what you can find out about people using online compilations of public records. It takes imagination and ingenuity to figure out how to put together a project like this, too: you can't just punch 'CIA' into a database and get a magic list.

And, of course, it wasn't technically 'The Internet' they used. It was commercial databases that you have to be vetted to subscribe to. You have to be trained to use them. And you can't use them in ways that violate people's privacy. Trib senior correspondent and researcher Brenda J. Kilianski played it by the rules:

The Tribune is not disclosing the identities of any of the CIA employees uncovered in its database searches, the searching techniques used or other details that might put agency employees or operatives at risk.

But, darn it, they didn't use 'the Internet'. They used private databases that you can access using the World Wide Web, but aren't available by a 'Google' search. This isn't something that any Web user can do. This is something only available to certain organizations in the public interest, and something that takes experienced knowledge of the databases to do.

But whatever, it's really cool what they came up with, like this:

For decades the CIA's training facility at Camp Peary, Va., near historic Williamsburg, remained the deepest of secrets. Even after former CIA personnel confirmed its existence in the 1980s the agency never acknowledged the facility publicly, and CIA personnel persisted in referring to it in conversation only as "The Farm."
But an online search for the term "Camp Peary" produced the names and other details of 26 individuals who according to the data are employed there. Searching aviation databases for flights landing or taking off from Camp Peary's small airstrip revealed 17 aircraft whose ownership and flight histories could also be traced.

Sunshine Week:

It's heartening to see all the projects in various newspapers leading up to Sunshine Week, even if they're only carrying the latest AP survey. (On the other end of the spectrum, the News & Observer's special Open Government section....via Derek).
Also, don't miss Joe Adams' links to Florida newspapers' projects on the Florida Sunshine Review.

Lots of good links for public records and open government on Al's Morning Meeting today. Also, for finding good links, Amy Gahran of E-Media Tidbits has created a del.icio.us tag for Sunshine Week where you can find links to stories, blog comments, etc.

Then there's the Sunshine Week blog....

(Added later:) More: State and National Freedom of Information Resources, from The National Freedom of Information Coalition, a list I hadn't seen before.
Coalition of Journalists for Open Government. Some great news and links here, including a link to a Wisconsin songwriter's "Open Records Blues", and Useful Web Sites.

Thanks to Knight Foundation's newsletter for these links. And to the Foundation's website for link to this: What has 'The media' done for us lately? by the Foundation's Eric Newton in The Miami Herald:

So journalists need you. But you need them, too. If journalists don't tell you about this stuff, who will? The system won't tell you, not even in America. That's why all successful democracies have had a free and independent media. No system will easily admit its wrongs.

Big news:

At least for me and thousands of other Knight Ridder employees, alumni and retirees: the sale to McClatchy.

It's difficult to process such a change and hard not to be concerned. But there seems to be nothing but good news about McClatchy's journalism ethic. I haven't had much to go on as far as getting an impression of McClatchy, except to have watched the changes as they took over the formerly family-owned News & Observer in Raleigh. One thing did concern me about this: the N&O had a groundbreaking website, the NANDO Times, which McClatchy shut down a couple years ago.

This comment from McClatchy alum J.D. Lasica is heartening though:

It's good news for anyone who cares about journalism. While McClatchy has sacrificed some quality over the years in cost-cutting bids to please Wall Street, it's a company that still cares deeply about journalism, unlike some other potential bidders, which could have gutted Knight Ridder's staff and turning its local newspaper monopolies into pure money-printing machines.

More on my Miami Herald blog.

Weekend update: Other things found last week:


I'm trying to get more postings here and did better this week. Unfortunately it seems posting more here means less postings on my Miami Herald blog.
Oh well. There will be some changes in future, anyway. I'm still overdue for redesigning this blog and updating the links pages, and will be able to get to that one of these days.

The links:

Reference:

Women's History resources from Gale.

Textile Database: searching or browsing gets you photos of lovely ancient and modern textiles.

Online medical dictionary review: unsure which one to use? Gale's Digital Reference Shelf reviews Taber's (On RXList, lower left-hand column) and several others.

OpenJ-gate is a free journal search from Informatics.

Physical and mental health characteristics of U.S. and foreign-born adults, 1998-2003 Includes this: "These immigrants become less healthy the longer they reside in the United States."

Derby Data Track from the Courier-Journal, Louisville. Lookup or compare horses in contention this year.

Best Walking Cities in America from podiatrist's assn, no surprise Miami comes in 79th of 100....

UN Reform Report

The Silent Epidemic, study of school dropouts from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Pesticides in U.S. streams and waterways, new report from USGS.

Pew Institute for Ocean Science

Muslim Heritage: beautiful site includes a '1001 Muslim Inventions' weblog.

How Products are Made: database of descriptions of hundreds of products.

ArchiveGrid: a new collection of archives available to search for free til end of May.

AOL Beta In2TV Search: if you have an AOL account or free IM account, you can search and download old TV shows here.

Governments, Politics:

Next week is Sunshine Week.

Survey of State criminal history information systems, 2003 from BJS.

Journalism:

GreatReporter.com highlights good journalism around the world.

News University: Freedom of Information course is available to take for free.

News:

Titanic Archive: this is pages of newspapers carrying stories from the 1912 sinking, searchable. A free service from the fee-based NewspaperArchive.com.

Irish Newspaper Archives search several papers going back into history with some up to present; first few page images are available for free, then you need to register for subscription to see more.

Business:

Iran's Oil and Gas Wealth study from Joint Economic Committee.

Sports Markets: which cities can support them? from American Business Journals, calls St. Pete the 'most overextended'.

Public Records:

PI Buzz is a new blog on public records, etc., from two PIs, including Tamara Thompson who had another blog called PI News Link.

The Art of Public Records Research: good article from Cyberskeptic's Guide via The Virtual Chase. Here's a good one:

Excluded Parties List. Find individuals who've been barred from getting Federal contracts or doing business w/ the federal govt. More extensive than the HHS excluded individuals search I linked to earlier...

Statistics:

Felony Defendants in large U.S. counties, latest stats from BJS.

Performance Profiles of major energy producers, 2004 from EIA.

Retail Customer Dissatisfaction Survey, 2006 (PDF).

Traffic Volume Trends, December 2005: DoT stats show driving miles slightly down nationwide, except in West and Gulf states.

Florida:

Guide to Florida Government, 2005 (in PDF) and The Clerk's Manual (2004-6) (browse by page or download).

People:

Washington's Invisible Man: Vanity Fair profile of Jack Abramoff. (preview PDF).

Forbes Billionaire's list 2006

Some interesting stories/blogs:

Blogging at the U.S.'s 100 biggest newspapers, a list. (Main. From Jay Rosen's new Blue Plate Special.

Tech Talk is a Web searching blog at WRAL, Raleigh, from search expert Tara Calishain. (I may have linked previously but needed that reminder to myself to check it more often.)

Mixed Signals, an NPR blog.

The Mechanic and the Muse a blog on writing from Chip Scanlan at Poynter.

New Miami Herald blogs:

The Herald seems to be getting into the swing of things, with some blogging additions (and I note they've gone back to Blogspot for a couple of the newest blogs, not Typepad like mine and some of the older blogs).

James Burnett has a new blog called Burnett's Urban Etiquette, about rudeness and how to fix it. This seems to feed off of Marty Merzer's Sunday story this week, How Rude!

On the other hand, there is a new Typepad blog by Oscar Corral, Miami's Cuban Connection. This should be good as Oscar is one of the best observers of this scene around. He also blogrolls a bunch of other Cuban blogs.

And I think I mentioned the Crazy for Critters blog by Ellie Brecher a couple of weeks ago. Here's another blogger who knows what she's talking about.

Titanic Newspaper Archive:

Another new free archive from Newspaperarchive.com, here are pages of newspapers carrying stories about the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. The stories are searchable.

Rewriting history:

I've meant to mention the Miami Herald's Flashback series, an occasional look at a story that made the paper years ago, and how it affected the future or changed lives.

Last week, Luisa Yanez wrote about Jim Morrison's trial on exposure charges after a concert at the Coconut Grove Dinner Key Auditorium (now Convention Center) in 1969.

The story doesn't cover new ground but does a nice job of wrapping up the story and what happened to Morrison and the Doors after. I like the idea of doing this, there are so many old great stories that are worth reminding people about. Nice that two researchers -- Paul Hodges and Monika Leal -- get credit on the story, too.

Weekend update: Other things found last week:


This week I'm pretty much back to normal (aside from a small annoying cough) after nearly a month of cold and flu. Entire month of February, gone. That's the worst bout of illness I've had in dozens of years. Now that we're feeling better the local paper is finally saying there's flu going around.
Oh well, if all I have to complain about is flu there's not much to complain about at all. Nice to feel better (and taste food again, that was the worst part); and spring's on its way. Hope you all avoided the bug this year.

The links:

Reference:

Medical Dictionary from AskSam.

Movie Archive links from Resourceshelf.

Avian influenza pandemic resource guide

Annual Global Climate and catastrophe report

Governments, Politics:

Department of State Newsmaker search: find experts.

TRAC report on federal judges examines individual case load, stats.

ReadtheBill.org: new campaign to get Congress members to read text of bills 72 hours before voting on them.

Americans' Awareness of First Amendment Freedoms, a survey.

18 years of "Dirty War" in Mexico. Natl Security Archive's copy of draft of report from Mexico's special prosecutor.

Journalism:

News College: 'Practical Journalism Tips' from a newsroom newsletter.

News:

Winter Games Newspaper Archive: a bit late, but this site has images of newspaper pages from historical newspapers; winter games stories available for free.

Business:

Enron Trial Exhibits and Releases from DoJ.

America's Most Admired Companies, 2006 from Fortune.

More on Ports, from LII: American Assoc. of Ports Authorities: industry info (includes statistics, issues, news); Background on Dubai Ports World purchase of P&0 from Council of Foreign Relations; Port Security from Counter Terrorism Training site; Securing U.S. Ports factsheet from Dept of Homeland Security.

Tools:

Kosmix a new search engine for Health, Politics, Travel.

ClusterMed: a search of PubMed using Vivisimo's clustering technology.

Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves) has lots of new specialized searches, a mapping service, weather, images, lots more.

Public Records:

Maryland Judiciary Case Search covers civil, criminal, traffic (except for Montgomery and Prince George's).

EPA Compliance and Enforcement: settled cases.

Statistics:

Just Released, Health Status, Health Insurance, and Health Services Utilization: 2001 (PDF) from Census.

Online activities and pursuits: latest survey from Pew Internet.

Latest stats on cosmetic surgery

2006 Economic Report of the President.

Some interesting stories/blogs:

Bloglossary: find terms used in blogs.

Newsvine:

It's now open (Newsvine.com) without invitation, although you'll still need to register to comment or write a column. This is the new open source, community news service, which lets you customize your news or see what people are saying about stories. It's been getting some pretty interesting reviews from folks who were invited to preview it.....

A long history

Wonderful story in the Washington Post's Federal Diary column as columnist Stephan Barr notes a change in location for the column after many years: A Change of Scenery, but Not of Purpose, on This Column's Long Journey. the column has been around since 1932, and in all that time, only about 5 columnists have written it. I was around the post at the end of the Jerry Kluttz and beginning of the Mike Causey eras. MIke retired a couple years ago and handed the column off to Barr.
Nice to know there are newspaper traditions that last this long.....and nice to see two Post researchers got credit for locating this history.