Here's a very neat idea. nyc bloggers is a map of New York City, including all its underground lines, with the whereabouts of 150-odd of the city's weblog authors marked.
I can't help but think that would be very useful if it was nearer home. Imagine being able to call on an army of enthusiastic local correspondents every time something happened. Someone should do it for Britain — but don't look at me, I'm busy.
News Is FreeI'm not sure I entirely get News Is Free, other than to say it currently carries 2886 feeds from different news sources, some rather loosely defined.
You can browse by subject or search their headlines, or you can make your own selection and read them with a special program or place them on your website. There's just so much of it, and it's so hard to track down exactly what you are looking for. Quite a lot of British stuff, with feeds from the BBC, The Guardian, ThisisLondon and so on.
Now this is what I call niche marketing. A website that seeks out corrections columns. It's called Slipup.com: America's Newspaper Corrections Connection, but rest assured, The Guardian is in there too.
A cautionary taleA wonderfully funny warning about using stuff straight off the Internet appears in CyberJournalist.net Cyber Slip-Ups. Apparently, the New York Times believed that in China, "George of the Jungle" was known as "Big Dumb Monkey Man Keeps Whacking Tree With Genitals."
My journalism pageAs promised many times, I have finally put together my UK journalism page. Next I'm going to assemble something on US journalism sites, of which there are many.
If you don't know it, Free Pint is a rich source of useful free material for people interested in using the Internet for research. But if you are looking at companies, you could do a lot worse than sample its paid-for offerings at the Free Pint UK Company Research Gateway. A mere £8 brings you a list of any individual's company directorships. For £24 you get a comprehensive look at a company's financial standing.
The World Cup Archive is a fan's site with no official backing. Nonetheless, it is an impressive collection of material.
If you want to find out about the qualifying rounds in 1962, this is the place to look. Sadly, I couldn't find the name of the Russian linesman who played such a prominent role in 1966. But you can't have everything.
Kidon Media-Link may be the biggest list of online news outlets around the world that has yet been assembled. Newspapers, television, radio and so on are grouped together, which may not be to your taste, but there is no doubting the range here. I had a quick look to see what's going on in Rio de Janiero: apparently there's a debate about the installation of closed-circuit television in the streets. It's a small world.
AllTheWeb finds Acrobat filesApparently, AllTheWeb.com, which is many people's other search engine, now indexes .pdf or Acrobat documents.
Google already does this: the difference is that AllTheWeb indexes the whole thing, whereas Google stops at around the 30/35 page mark in the case of most print documents. If you suspect that your search term is buried in one of those huge .pdfs, much favoured by government, give AllTheWeb a try.
It is worth getting to know this search engine, which will also do date-limited searches (everything before 1999, for instance). Take a good look at the advanced search page.
More Google magicEvery day those bright sparks at Google come up with something new. Now they've put some of their pre-release ideas online at labs.google.com - Google Demos.
The one that immediately caught my eye was Google Definitions. Type in a word or phrase and it will cough up some kind of definition. Unfortunately, when it can't find a sensible source, it gives you what it can find.
It couldn't find "bog-standard" at all, but had pages on "line of sight", because it is a technological term. Then, when I tried "soccer mom" I was directed to a site that assured me that it was soon to be compulsory for working mothers in the US to drive vans. I think not.
More interesting, but not obviously useful, was Google Sets. Type in two or three similar items and it will find you lots more that match. I tried "apples" and "pears". It returned an exhaustive list of fruits, ending with "brussels sprouts". Fun, though.
Plagiarists bewareSince the advent of the Internet, plagiarism has been a real problem for academics. But it always has been a worry for writers and editors. Something called PlagiServe - Global Academic integrity service promises to sort it out (at least when it comes to school essays) by technological means, but I am not yet convinced.
I have sent them some questions, but have yet to receive a reply. They don't charge for the service, and they don't sell their mailing list... so what's in it for them? Curiously, the service is based in Ukraine.
You can find images on the web easily enough through Google, but a specialised search engine like Picsearch makes a better job of it.
I was looking for a new typewriter for my logo, and Picsearch pointed me at 695 of them. I didn't like many of them, but that's inevitable.
You know, of course, that most of these pictures belong to someone. Picsearch shows you who is currently using them online. It is up to you to negotiate with them, if they are the owners.
Posted by morrish at 11:17 AM
Posted by: John Morrish on May 16, 2002 05:44 PM
It seems like another world now, but there was a time when newspaper offices smelt of oil and started to shake in the late afternoon. A site called Linotype & Linotipisti pays a gentle hommage to the mechanical miracle that was the Linotype machine.
The front page starts in Italian, but there is plenty of English on the site, including some sentimental but nonetheless touching poetry about these extraordinary devices, which turned the operator's keystrokes into lines of hot lead type ready to be locked up into pages.
Great stuff if you remember those days. If you don't, you're lucky, because in some ways they were awful. But this will be an education for you. "Do you think the type's made of rubber!" the hot-metal men used to say, when your headline didn't fit. And now, effectively, it is.
I think that's a fair description of The Virtual Acquisition Shelf & News Desk. Gary Price is both a serious librarian and an eager seeker-out of useful new Internet resources. I've mentioned it before, but it has a new home and web address: http://resourceshelf.freepint.com. Add this to your bookmarks: you will find it interesting.
Keep your searches privateEvery time you search, you give the search engine information. Is that a worry?
A man called Marc Roessler, who describes himself as a "privacy nut", has written a interesting paper on Search Engines and Privacy. It notes exactly which sites extract which information and, where possible, what they do with it. One conclusion: the paranoid should stick with Google, which is responsible about privacy and technically competent in managing it.
The Open Directory Project is one of the great institutions of the Web. It's a kind of Yahoo! but staffed by volunteers and enthusiasts.
Unfortunately, its profile hardly matches that of the commercial operations, even though its resources are used by several of them. But now it has created the Open Directory Project Forum where you can address any questions to the people who actually put the directory together.
In the end, I found a typewriter I liked on a Portuguese web-building site. It was free clip-art. I think... Nao falo bem portugues...