Search Those Blogs
If you ever want to search the world's weblogs, you might like to try Bloogz The Blogs Search Engine: .
It's a nice clean site, letting you search in five languages and arrange your results by relevance and date. You can also ask it to list just today's weblog posts. You should know that it will not let you do phrase searches, which is a shame.
If you still don't know what a weblog or blog is, you're reading one. It's a frequently-updated webpage with items in (usually) reverse chronological order. Bear in mind, though, that most weblogs are rather more personal and discursive than this one.
No lottery mystery
I've had an email from the New Opportunities Fund, gently chiding me for saying that the Pathe site mentioned below was created with "mysterious assistance from the National Lottery".
In fact, there's no mystery at all (except to those of us whose eyes glaze over at anything lottery-related). The lottery funds the the New Opportunities Fund, which has a £50m programme to digitise the collections of 150 British organisations and get them online for public use.
If you want to take a look at some of these gems, try the NOF's portal, Welcome to EnrichUK, which offers browsing by subject, simple and advanced search facilities or access to individual England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland sites.
I did notice that quite a lot of these links lead to sites that are currently being reconstructed, which can be frustrating. But it is not the policy of this site to complain about the odd dead link, for obvious reasons…
A tidy reference site
Look down the page a bit and you'll see I recommend a site called 1Up Health. Well, here's another, called 1Up Info – Encyclopedia & Reference Resource.
This is a good straightforward information "portal" (a word we don't hear much any more) intended for teachers and schoolchildren but useful to many of us. It has lots of useful links, laid out on its front page in an arrangement of the site's own devising. Note that these don't look like links: I really think it would be better if they were underlined, according to the old-fashioned web standard.
On top of those external links, the site also provides a good front-end for the well-known Columbia Encyclopaedia and a North American gazetteer, the former accessed alphabetically from any page on the site. All in all, nicely done, although some subjects are covered in more depth than others.
The site has been created by two gentlemen from India, brothers I suspect, to whom we should be grateful. It is supported by advertising, but nothing obnoxious.
Pathe News
News from the newsreel archive of British Pathe, which has upgraded its website in various ways. The best thing is that it has used the original 20th century newsreel footage to create a series of still pictures for download and perusal or online purchase.
The archive is now owned by ITN, the British Independent television news company, with some mysterious assistance from the National Lottery. But all parties seem to be doing a lovely job. I know it's not strictly journalistic to say so, but this is a delightful site for anyone with any interest in Britain during the newsreel years.
And the best thing is that it is operating a commendably generous policy for educational users, who are allowed to use the low-res preview clips for nothing.