If you like information-packed sites that try to fit everything on one page, you ought to have a look at TheBigProject, which claims to be "a UK Internet Guide/Portal with useful links to jobs, UK Online Shopping Guides, recruitment agencies, uk portals, travel websites, engineering, oil and gas, London Congestion Charging, etc".
Personally, I find the type too small and too multi-coloured for my tastes, but there is no doubting that there are a huge number of links here, including to many newspapers around the world. It's the kind of thing that should be encouraged, so take a look. But put your reading specs on first.
If you need more information anything about this war, you should take a look at lii.org Theme Collection: War and Peace, an excellent collection of background, commentary and reporting links, assembled by the Librarians' Index to the Internet. If you want a more directly journalistic collection, go to The Journalist's Toolbox on Conflict: Iraq and The United States.
Either will tell you infinitely more than gawping at the television news, which increasingly tends towards 'sound and fury signifying nothing'.
Meanwhile, there has been a great deal of excitable stuff about the so-called 'warblogs', meaning weblogs about and from the war. As usual, they are extremely variable in focus, attitude and quality. And a lot of the interesting ones have been stopped, either by their bosses or by circumstances.
Still, if you want to have a look, there's a long list at CyberJournalist. Most are 'embedded', as they say, with the US/British forces. You might also want to read the famous 'Baghdad blogger', Salam Pax. Draw your own conclusions: most people think he's the real thing. But I do wonder why someone blogging from Baghdad would have an nme.com email address.
It's hard to claim great journalistic relevance for this, at least on this side of the Atlantic, but I suppose it might represent the shape of things to come. If you go to the Georgia Parolee Database, you can enter someone's name and see if an offender of that name is living on parole near you (assuming you live in the state of Georgia, of course). Or, you can search by crime or address.
It seems bizarre to us, but over there they'd see it as part of the citizen's right to know. Oh look, here's someone called George Bush, white, 5' 9", on parole until 2012, after being found guilty of burglary. And living in something called the Jones Acres Trailer Park.
Well, it amused me.
Ever wonder where all that lottery money goes? Apart from the hopeless British film industry, that is.
A look at EnrichUK will show you that a great slice has gone to something surprisingly worthwhile. This is a gateway site for a whole group of lottery-funded projects putting British history online. And there's a lot more here than simple websites.
I particularly like the Digital Library of Historical Directories, which cleverly lets you search scanned pages from mostly 19th century county directories. And then there is Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674 to 1834, which includes details of some 22,000 trials.
On this day in 1751, for instance, a man called William Bishop stole four linen waistcoats and a pair of canvas trousers. A month later he was found guilty and sentenced to transportation. These contemporary reports have nothing much to do with journalism as practised today, but they are little gems of compression and reporting. Irresistible stuff.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could come into the office every morning to find that someone had already searched Google for new developments in your subject area?
There are, in fact, several ways of doing this. The simplest is probably SearchAlert.net, a little site that takes your search details and your email address and then sends you results daily or at whatever interval you set. It's very simple, and it works.
You might worry, though, about the lack of information available on the site about how it works, who's running it and why. I emailed the site for more information, but didn't get any. The domain was registered by Rob Janson of Oz Fuel Cells, an energy magazine in Australia. If you're monitoring your own name, Rob (and who doesn't), get in touch and tell us about it.
I notice (4th Feb 2004) that this site is not responding. Perhaps it's just a temporary problem.
A slightly more slick operation is Google Alert, which has a clean look and plenty of information. The slight snag is that it only works if you, the user, get yourself what is known as a "Google key". That's a code that gives you direct access to the Google database so you can search it in your own special way.
You don't have to do any of the programming: just follow the instructions on the Googlert page to get the key, then paste it into the box on the Googlert registration page, and then forget all about it.
Both systems work well and are very useful, not to mention free. Expect to get a rush of results at the beginning and fewer after that as the alert pages switch to telling you just about changes.
By the way, if you want to know about changes in a single page, rather than the whole web, use InfoMinder. NB: this site was free for occasional use, but now only offers a free trial and then a paid-for subscription at $24.95 a year. I've suggested they offer a better deal for occasional and small-scale users.
And if you want to search the Usenet newsgroups, using Google Groups, you can use NetNews Tracker, which is, as far as I know, still free.
Time to take another look at AlltheWeb.com. It can't be much fun being a rival search engine to the all-conquering Google, but AlltheWeb keeps plugging away and occasionally comes up with a few tricks of its own.
For instance, if you type a URL (web address) into the search box, it gives you all sorts of information about the site in question. For instance, it tells you who links to it and, where it can, who owns it. And there's something new: it has a link to the the Wayback Machine, the Internet archive, so that you can see what a site looked like in the past.
Try it with www.journolist.com, and you'll see this site before my last big redesign. Hmm, I'm not sure I didn't like it better like that.
About the warThe American Press Institute has produced a useful site called Beyond the Battle: Bringing Global Stories Home to help journalists on US local papers get to grips with covering the impending war in the Gulf.
There's quite a good guide to using graphics, lots of stuff on how to cover a local disaster or terrorist incident and perhaps a bit too much on counselling your own staff when they find it all too stressful. Many journalists thrive on disaster: that might be a more genuine danger.
One little piece talks about 'linking your communities to the world': in fact it refers almost entirely to linking your communities to loved ones in the American armed services around the world. Not quite the same thing.
Anyway, there is also a link to an excellent list of disaster resources put together by CBS News. It modestly says it is not comprehensive, but it does cover every thing from anthrax to avalanches.