Database of code violations by Manhattan landlords.
Google Web Toolkit out of beta.
New employment law blawg.
Google Earth has a built in flight simulator?
An online database for helping find housing for low-income, disabled folks in NY.
New study of American blogging.
Thanks to DC for pointing me at free mindmapping for Macs.
Engineering records going online.
The Pennsylvania State Archives has added over 300,000 images of land records to the Web. (That’s more than 31 gigs of data.) You can access these new records at The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission’s Web site, at www.phmc.state.pa.us . (That URL is a redirect that’ll take you to portal.state.pa.us and a much more complex URL.)
The additions include warrant registers (1733-1957), patent indexes (1684-1957) and the Philadelphia Old Rights index. You can start your search here; be sure to read the instructions because there are several sets of documents you can search.
A lot of the available documents are in PDF format so make sure you’ve got Adobe Acrobat reader.
Google News has announced that it has become removing duplicates of articles from search results, now going back and providing the original article. (This has been in sort-by-date for a while.) In doing some experimenting I’ve found that this isn’t perfect — I’ll still very occasionally get the marginally-rewritten wire story in my results — it’s better. A lot better. Removing the dupes seems to be bringing a lot more editorials and columnists to the front, which is great.
Google also announced that it would be hosting Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association, and Canadian Press content from now on. Looks like the correct source: syntax for finding Associated Press content is source:the_associated_press. If you do the search washington source:the_associated_press you’ll get 346 results at this writing with pointers to content hosted at ap.google.com .
I wanted to see how much crossover is going on so I went to Google and searched inurl:ap.google.com. You’ll get some results if you do that, but not many (I found about 17) and Google does not have these pages available as cached. So they really are just on Google News.
To find just Google-hosted content on Google News, use site:google.com with your regular Google News search.
This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .
School’s back in session! Looking for educational offerings for your kids? Family Education has launched a new “printables” center, available at http://printables.familyeducation.com/ .
The site allows you to pick an age range (from 0-3 to 12-18 — 12-18 is kind of a wide range, isn’t it?) and a category (including Art & Music, Skill Builders, and Coloring Pages) to get a list of available pages. You can also look at lists of popular pages that are available at the front of the site.
I looked at Forms & Charts for 7-11 years old and found charts in a variety of categories, including Genealogy, Learning Disabilities (including a symptoms chart for Asperger) and even lunchbox notes. Click on the name of a printable and you’ll get a little description of the chart and an invitation to view/download it.
Unfortunately in order to get to the printable you do have to register. This is more annoying than invasive but it IS annoying. You’ll have to provide an e-mail address. The site’s privacy policy is here; nothing is untoward but the site has one of those annoying deals where they precheck newsletter boxes, presuming on your behalf that you want to read what they have to offer. EIGHT newsletters. Um.
After (providing an e-mail address, carefully unclicking all eight newsletter boxes, and) registering, I clicked on View Printable and got a PDF file that was, in fact, printable.
I found a surprising variety of resources here, though some of them seemed rather out of the stated scope (why do the 7-11 year olds need the “Appreciating Your Spouse Quiz”?) and the registration process is annoying. If you’re a teacher and a homeschooler you might find some cool stuff here.
This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .
This is a great idea. Wikirage ( http://www.wikirage.com/ ) tracks the Wikipedia entries with the most edits per unique editor over given periods of time. So it’s somewhat about what people are interested in, but also what they’re interested in revising…
The default view from the front page is for the most edits in the last day. But you can check a time window as narrow as the last hour or as wide as the last month. No matter what time span you’ll check you’ll get a list of the entries that have had the most unique editor edits in that time period.
I checked out the last day. I saw that the number one listing on that page was Richard Jewell (who, as you might remember, was wrongly accused of being involved with the bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics. “Why in the world,” I thought, “is his page high on the edits list?” I clicked on it and got a summary of the page from Wikipedia, as well as a graph of the number of unique editors for that page (which had spiked in the last day.)
But I did not get the whole story until I clicked through to the Wikipedia page itself (which is linked through the “Summary from Wikipedia” line; it’s a bit hard to find.) Richard Jewell passed away today. Despite checking in with multiple news sites through the day, I did not get the news on this until I saw the link in Wikirage (and confirmed with a check of CNN.)
Not everything on the list was a person. There were several people, but I also noticed video games, historical events, sports teams — even films and TV shows.
What an interesting perspective to track. The only thing I’d add would be a way to make the linkthrough to the actual Wikipedia article more obvious, and perhaps add a direct link to the history page (so you can get some idea of what edits are being made and at what speed.)
I can’t believe I’m writing this in August 2007, but if you’re busy thinking about November 2008 you’ll have lots of fun over at Wonkosphere ( http://wonkosphere.com ), a site which is tracking buzz on the major presidential candidates. (I saw only Republican and Democratic candidates represented.)
The site tracks with a graph the candidates and their level of buzz in the blogosphere. It also pulls out particular posts and provides stats for chatter in different sections of the ’sphere — conservative, liberal, and neutral. Dennis Kucinich, clocking in at number 10 on the list of 12, has a list of recent blog posts mentioning him and the tone among liberal and conservative blogs (Tone measures how positive the content of the blog postings was.) (Why not list the tone among politically-neutral blogs? In some ways I would find that the most interesting stat.)
Each candidate, as you might expect, also has their own page. Here is John McCain’s page. Graphs show buzz and tone over time (with a comparison to the candidates overall) and a list shows the most recent blog posts dealing with the candidate. And here’s where there might be a slight problem. On McCain’s page (and several other candidate pages) there are a lot of stories about Larry Craig. I don’t know if that’s because there are brief candidate mentions, or if because there’s been such a huge amount of coverage of that particular story so quickly, but they have very little to do with the candidates in whose lists they are appearing.
I found I got more out of the blog posts when it was very obvious (via the headline) that they were about a particular candidate, or about a particular issue that candidate was known for. I got the data and the current discussion points from there and relied on the graphs for an overview on where the candidate is buzzwise.
If you’re wondering exactly what blogs are being mined for this data, you can get a breakdown at http://wonkosphere.com/directory.htm . There are something over 1200 blogs here. I was very surprised at how many more conservative (over 700) blogs there were compared to liberal (just over 400.) There were a tiny number (45) of independent blogs.
Despite the fact that the hype machine is gassing up and pulling out onto the highway, the elections are still over a year away, and because of that news political coverage is still unformed, speculating about possible presidential candidates (even longshots), focusing on the current administration, and getting easily distracted by scandal. That makes Wonkosphere’s job tough. I expect as we get closer to the election, narrow down the candidates, etc, the buzz reporting and post lists will get a lot better. Worth a look.
I loves me some new ways to explore large pools of frequently-updated information. (Dear ThinkGeek, please slap that on a t-shirt. Love, Tara.) A play I found recently is WikiMindMap, at http://www.wikimindmap.org/ .
Basically you start by entering a search — I found general works better — and WikiMindMap will start plotting out all the different ways your search can go. Unfortunately I started with the search cows and got some really bizarre entry about how cows were invented and sent back in time to work in bullet factories in 1775.
After I stopped laughing I did another search — this time for coffee and got a much more prosaic response. A “mindmap” — one of those diagrams that starts with a central idea and then sort of runs off in all directions — appears. Some parts of the mindmap are single concepts, while some are additional categories that you can expand. The coffee search included concepts like Persian and Ethiopia, and additional categories of information like History, Cultivation, and Economics. Hold your mouse over a category part of the mindmap to see an extract from Wikipedia. (Note you also have the option to zoom in on the WikiMindMap. If you do that you might not be able to see that window that appears on mouseover.)
Clicking on the green icon next to a concept recenters the map so you can start over again with exploring another topic. You can also move the map around by clicking and dragging; once a few categories have been opened, maps get pretty extensive.
I picked a topic I know very little about (plasma TVs) and did some mapping to see how much I could learn. I don’t know if I got much more educated than I would have going straight to Wikipedia. I DID notice that the mapping application immediately gave me a head start on the proper vocabulary, which would be a great help if I did additional Web searching.
I tried searching for famous people with the same idea in mind, and out of three people (Sun Pin, Carl Von Clausewitz, and Jimmy Carter — sorry, I have rather an odd stack of books on the desk at the moment) only one name generated enough information to be useful (Jimmy Carter). But that search brought up a lot of keywords that might be interesting to use in an associate search, like stagflation and Camp David Accords.
Nice tool. The only thing I’d like to see is an easy way to grab a screen shot and e-mail it somewhere (from within the site)…
Real-time traffic in Google Earth. MESSED UP! (In a good way.)
PublicRoutes.com adds new cities.
Reverse Geocoding with Google Maps. Oooo.
Checking for copies with DOC Cop.
This seems counterintuitive: Environmental Disasters Reduce the Likelihood of Pro-Green Votes by Members of Congress
Wikipedia merrymaking down under.
On Computers got a redesign! Very nice.
Ball State University headed to Second Life.
What do laptops and hypothyroidism have in common? Both tend to give you unsatisfactory battery life. (But Synthroid sure helps!)
Database — foreclosed properties in Missouri. Fee access.
Acer buying Gateway. This upsets me a lot. Every time two computer makers consolidate, it seems like us end users end up with fewer and crappier choices at the retail store. I like Gateway fine (I sure like them more than I did 10-12 years ago) and I like Acer fine. But I don’t like less choice.
Tracking volcano and hurricane activity — with Google Maps…
new WWI diary in digital archive.
With two coconuts and some bamboo… sorry, wrong professor. THIS professor is Clement Yu from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and he’s come with a metasearch engine for news. What impressed me was its scope — it covers about 1800 news search engines across about 200 countries and territories. After all that it has the terribly pedantic name Allinonenews; you can try it at www.allinonenews.com.
From the front page of the search engine you’ll find some top news stories already picked for you. And the lead story is … the Michael Vick plead? The AG resignation? No; the end of the Notting Hill Carnival. Actually I find that rather refreshing. (Don’t worry; the Vick and Gonzales stories are both on the front page if you really want to read them.) A nav on the left of the page shows several other categories through which you can browse.
Searching is by simple keyword. Feeling festive I did a search for carnival. I got a small set of results (about 30) with an invitation to click for more results. I did that and got a total of 288 results.
I could see no way to list the results by date — not good — but I did see a link to get results in RSS format. Results include the usual title-summary-URL. From the front page of results I noted sources from the UK, Germany, and Australia. (Searching for Shinzo Abe brought equally diverse results.) A link at the top of the search results allows you to leave comments about the quality of what you’re finding.
It should be noted that all sources searched should truly be considered search engines … CNN is not in my opinion a news search engine, but a source. But that’s okay. Still a wide variety of results here covering all kinds of sources.
Did I mention the RSS feeds? AllinOne has a page devoted to them. You can get keyword-based feeds, topic based feeds, or feeds from popular queries (interesting idea.)
This site is so not Web 2.0 — at least not in the design sense. The stark layout and simple logo may leave you thinking it’s 2002. I don’t care. I liked the range of sources the search result got, and the depth (some queries got me stories from back in 2000.) For a developing/extremely major story I don’t know if I’d use AllinOne; for a basic search/overview I like it a lot. Now if only I could easily get it to search results by date…
I used to read the New York Times quite a lot — this was several years ago. Eventually I just trailed off. It seemed like I was spending more time logging in than actually getting anything read. Now NYTimes.com is making My Times available, which is a portal (AAAAH! NOT THE P-WORD!) for Times content. I might have to do some more reading. You can check it out at http://my.nytimes.com/ .
I dusted off my ancient account and logged in. And actually it’s quite a bit more than NY Times content — as you can add RSS feeds and other content modules from all over the Web. When you first log in you’ll actually have a pre-populated page with all the usual portal favorites (weather, stock quotes, etc.) Choose Add Content to start making the page yours.
The front part add content page has three columns: one of Times content, one of stuff from around the Web (BBC, Yahoo, etc.) and one of widgets (photo browser, movie showtimes (?!), etc.) (You can also add RSS feeds of content that the NYT doesn’t list. Do that from the home page.) Be sure when browsing available content to explore the tabs on the left, which will give you access to more in-depth NYT items. These tabs are divided into topics and show the New York Times’ offerings and then suggestions for other content from around the Web. The eager recommendation of other stories in addition to the Times’ own makes the NYT look generous, confident, and smart. Good on you New York Times.
Anyway, moving the content around the page is as simple as click and drag. A nice feature is that you can add additional tabs to the main page; so you could have several sections divided out by category. (Gee, just like a newspaper.) As a matter of fact, if you didn’t have TOO many to read, My Times would make a very nice RSS feed reader. I’m going to have to try that for stuff I don’t want to check every day.
The only oddness I found about this site was the search for sources. I did a search for sources relating to Google and while I got Google News from the NYT as a search option, I also got pointers to NYT’s China news section. Since Google/China have recently been in the news, I can sort of see it, but I would rather see search blogs, official blogs from other engines, etc. in my search results. A search for Yahoo brought more expected results.
Lots of content, very responsive, easy to use, might be a useful feeder for low-moderate numbers of RSS feeds. I think My Times might be a portal I actually like.