I'm just coming to the end of a 30-day trial of Inbox Robot. In some ways it's rather good. It's a news search tool that sends you daily results by email.
You can see how useful this might be: if you cover half a dozen companies or organisations, you set up a search using their names. Every morning an HTML email drops into your box with links to any new pages in which they are mentioned.
Unfortunately, the creators of the tool are not very forthcoming. They don't provide a list of their sources, and they like to trap any pages you reach inside their own frame, which can be a nuisance. You can refine your search, but not very intelligently. You can't find only UK sites, for instance.
What's more, Inbox Robot costs $29.95 for six months. I have to say I found it useful, but not that useful. If you're a specialist, however, and someone else is paying, it might make more sense.
Take a look at Whois Report. It lets you find out who owns or operates from both current and expired domain names. Currently it doesn't include co.uk domains, but the site operators have applied for permission and may get the go-ahead soon. Not a multipurpose tool like Sam Spade, but much easier to use.
The Danish court verdict on deep linking has been much derided for its apparent perversity. A link, say the pundits, is a reference and not any sort of copyright infringement. The only people who are likely to be in trouble are those who present other people's material inside their own frames.
There's a good piece in SearchDay discussing this in more detail. Interestingly, National Public Radio in the US, which was also making threatening noises about links, has now backed down.
The definitive piece on the subject was written by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the the web, as long ago as 1997. It's called The Implications of Links, and deals with such knotty questions as whether you should ask permission before linking. (You should not.)
Blog search toolsWeblogs, or blogs, are potentially a great journalistic boon, but it is difficult to find what you want in them. Luckily, John Garside has produced a useful Blog Search Table that shows exactly how the sites that bring together numerous weblogs let you search them. The most useful would seem to be DayPop, which is frequently mentioned here, plus BlogHop and Eatonweb, both of which are new to me. Give them a try.
Today's Internet bad news comes from Denmark, where a court has ordered Newsbooster, a news search service, to stop linking deep into newspaper publishers' sites. Here's the Associated Press report of the case. Similar cases are grinding on in the States, and in all cases the motivation is that the publishers don't want people to by-pass the ads on their front pages. But if this takes off, it's the end of the web as we know it.
The last word on the Queen's Jubilee comes from The Framley Examiner. In the great tradition of local newspapers everywhere, and most enjoyable.
An interesting American site, Crashtest.com, assembles vehicle safety information from around the world and tabulates it. Most current British and European cars are in there and it does make eye-opening reading.
Aside from recommending a full complement of air-bags in your next car, the site puts forward weight as the single biggest safety factor: but only for you, not for anyone you run into. One more reason why the Americans won't be fulfilling any greenhouse gas quotas in the near future.
Telephone helplinesDid you know that there is aTelephone Helplines Association? Phone helplines are available to cover the whole range of health and social problems. The link here takes you to a searchable database of both local and national services around the UK. Of course, this is not the right way, journalistically, to approach these matters, but I can see it might be useful.