Wikileaks gets shut down. Um. Sort of.
Miami-Dade flood maps now online.
Genealogy site FindMyPast.com adds over a million records.
Wow. This is a library blog dedicated to the task of processing a particular photographic collection. Amazing… http://www.lib.unc.edu/blogs/morton/ .
Apple Shuffle gettin’ cheap.
NBC to start streaming old TV shows online. Free and ad-supported.
Vermont.gov now offers online ordering of vital records.
The Freakonomics blog has a post about free books available online. The recent free release of a Suze Orman book was an example along with a few other ones.
The blog post in itself is interesting but the other resources pointed to in the comments make it even better — several other free book opportunities are noted including links to other lists.
If you’d like to explore how the world of the university press world is gettin’ free, try this search on Google or Yahoo along with your favorite keywords: “university press” free download site:edu . (I found doing a more general search like free book downloads or free ebooks brought a lot of junk.) You’ll get some irrelevant stuff, but you’ll also get pointers to small university presses which are making their books available online for free.
To get other general overviews of what’s available, try site:edu free book downloads “university press” oxford yale harvard. Though that search will give you a lot of table-of-contents downloads and portions of books. And too keep up with new options, try free books download “university press” inurl:2008 (The inurl: portion is because many blogs archive by date, and inurl:2008 is an easy way to find recent entries.)
Google News announced recently that you can now search by city/state and zip code to get news. I don’t know why they’re talking about this while not saying much about the location: syntax, but whatever. Let’s get local.
When I think of hyperlocal news search (zip-code level) I think Topix. You can do zip code news searches by using the Google News advanced search form at http://news.google.com/advanced_news_search . (Don’t try to do the searches from the main search form; you’ll get really wonky results.)
I did a search for 82001, which is Cheyenne Wyoming. I got 492 results, from what looked like mostly Cheyenne searches. But if I did the same search and restricted the results to Wyoming media (again using the advanced search form) I got far fewer results.
(By the way, if you want you can search for news about one zip code — say, 82001 — in media from another state — say, New York. When I tried this I got some irrelevant information but I also got legitimate news from other sources.)
Searching by city and state worked equally well; searching for Burlington Vermont found over 1900 results, again mostly from that state’s media.
Doing some location searching is all very well, but nothing I saw here is going to tear me away from Topix. On the other hand, I see plenty of opportunities to add Google’s various special searches to the location search. For example, I might decide I only want television station stories from my search — I could add source:tv to my geography-based search. I might want to add keywords that are restricted to headlines — like searching for 90210 and then adding intitle:strike to the search.
(It appears that you have to edit the searches from the advanced search pages. When I tried to change the keywords on the search result page, Google News lost its location searching.)
When it comes to news by location, I’m going to stick with Topix. But I do want to do some additional playing with Google News’ area-based news in conjunction with other special syntax.
