As its name suggests, The Virtual Chase: Legal Research on the Internet, is intended primarily for legal researchers. But it has plenty of interesting stuff for the likes of us.
The best approach, I find, is to go to the site and sign up for Genie Tyburski's TVC Alert, an excellent daily or near-daily email newsletter about research, search, relevant legal controversies and useful online resources. It's American, inevitably, but as we well know, what starts there tends to come our way pretty quickly.
Anyone working on architectural, planning, construction or property titles — and there are lots of you — should get to know Abacus Construction Index, a directory containing links to some 2,000 relevant websites and documents.
The relevance should be strong, because the site was created by Alex Reid, formerly director-general of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
It's not the easiest site to find your way around, running several navigation systems simultaneously, but the links are generally well-chosen. A lot of the material is from product manufacturers, which won't be relevant in most journalistic situations, but there are is some really useful material if you look for it.
If I was still in that business (I started on Building Design) I would definitely look into some of the newsletters mentioned here. And the straightforward access to things like the Building Regulations beats anything on the Government's own sites. Plus, if you ever need to build a brick wall, you know where to look.
The news search tool NewsTrove claims a recommendation from the excellent Search Engine Watch. There's a search box, as usual, and it brings in most of the usual sources.
One innovation is a long list of ready-made searches for you. Just click on one of the links for news of various industries, countries, long-running stories and so on. (I only stumbled on the site because it appeared at the top of an AltaVista search for Ken Livingstone: the link claimed to be a 'Ken Livingstone site', which, if true, would be too horrible to contemplate. NewsTrove might think about the way it promotes itself...)
Sadly, there's no documentation to explain how best to use the search facility, so it's the usual trial and error, I'm afraid. Still, worth a look: we can't use Google for everything.
Imagine you find a book on Amazon, but you don't want to shell out for it if there's a chance you can get it in your local library.
You need Jon Udell's LibraryLookup. This is a bookmarklet. If you are not familiar with the term, it means a web-browser bookmark that runs a little JavaScript program to do something clever. In this case, you find the book on Amazon and the bookmarklet reads its ISDN serial number, then checks your local library catalogue to see if it's there.
You will need to know if your library uses the Talis (most UK local libraries) or Innovative (some college libraries) catalogue system. Follow the link on Jon's LibraryLookup page, find a link specifically for your county library system, and then either right-click (Mac: hold down mouse button) to add it to your favorites/bookmarks menu or drag it to your favourites toolbar.
That's the hard bit. To use it, just find the appropriate Amazon.co.uk page, pull down or click the bookmarklet, and there it is (or not, as the case may be). An ingenious and useful piece of work. (If there is no link for your library, you can always build one, but I think you'd have to know what you were doing.)
One site finds allHere's a useful gadget. Michael Fagan, a High School kid in Canada, has built a site that helps you use a multitude of search and reference tools.
The site, called Fagan Finder, has a search box and a selection of buttons. Type in your search term, click the appropriate button and see which site the finder is using for its search. Then press go (or Enter) and off you go. It's rather neat for those of us (beyond High School age, generally) who know there's a really good image-search tool somewhere but can't remember its name.
Now that's a diaryAlmost nothing to do with journalism, but an excellent site nonetheless. Pepys' Diary is exactly that, taken from the Project Gutenberg text and presented in weblog form, one day at a time, with annotations provided by interested readers. It's beautifully done.
The site also provides access to a string of Phil Gyford's other weblogs, and a useful introductory guide to the world of weblogs and RSS, which is one of those things I mean to get round to writing at some point.
I like rumours as much as the next person, but it's important to see they don't make it into print.
Take a look at TruthOrFiction.com, a site which investigates current bits of Internet lore and gives a view on whether they are to be trusted. It's searchable by keyword or subject matter and includes some real gems.