PostResearch

Firefox TableTools add-on lets you sort, filter, copy any html table

Michelle — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:38:26 +0000

TableTools lets you filter and sort html tables right in your browser. Sort alphabetically, numerically, by date. Filter by search or selection. Copy as html or tab-delimited.

The next generation of data searching

Michelle — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:27:14 +0000

Google’s public data search “makes it easy to find and compare public data.” Unemployment and population data (national, state and local) are available now, with promises of more to come. Google “population” or “unemployment” to see what it looks like.

Wolfram|Alpha, launching in May, promises to be even more cool:

What can it do? It can describe places, like Lexington, Mass., by its vital statistics, like location, population, weather, etc. It can compare Lexington with Moscow. If you type “LDL 180,” it will tell you the percentile of the population with higher or lower cholesterol and show you the answer on a chart. If you tell “LDL 180 male 45,” it will adjust the chart for gender and age group. It can chart the life expectancy of a male age 40 in Italy or tell you who was president of Brazil in 1928.

‘I Need to Read This’ saves URLs worth reading later

Michelle — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:01:48 +0000

From cnet news:

What’s nice about I Need to Read This is that you can use all of its services through bookmarklets instead of having to install anything in your browser.

The service maintains a complete list of stories you’ve saved, which is presented in reverse-chronological order. Like Read It Later, this is all saved in the cloud so you can access it from any computer.

The Twitter Status Generator

Michelle — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 01:52:23 +0000

When you’re not up to your erudite par, turn to the Twitter Status Generator for cleverly (or disturbingly) mysterious one liners.

Visualize what the media are saying with Media Cloud

Michelle — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:41:19 +0000

Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data. The system is still in early development, but we invite you to explore our current data and suggest research ideas. This is an open-source project, and we will be releasing all of the code soon.

Media Cloud is a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. Read more about the project or give it a spin here.

USA.gov Embraces Web 2.0

Michelle — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 02:38:18 +0000

Via ORB – Oregonian Research Blog:

USA.gov has a page dedicated to Government 2.0 resources, including:

Add Google News to your website

Michelle — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 02:10:45 +0000

From the Official Google Blog:

The world is a quickly changing place and it’s getting harder and harder to stay on top of the news. With this in mind, we’ve just released a Google News–based element for webmasters and developers. This makes it easy to integrate headlines and previews from Google News into any webpage, and for newspapers to reach new audiences across the web. Whether your visitors are interested in business, entertainment or fashion, you control the types of stories in your personal news show. You can input keywords like “Obama ” or “Superbowl” or broad topics like “world news” or “politics.” For more information, check out our post on the AJAX Search API Blog or get started with our wizard to automatically generate the code for you.

Historians will face ‘black hole’ of lost material

Michelle — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:49:16 +0000

The head of the British Library warns that “historians face a ‘black hole’ of lost material unless urgent action is taken to preserve websites and other digital records.”

Journalists toolbox

Michelle — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:17:04 +0000

The Journalist’s Toolbox, newly sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists, has tons of links to all sorts of useful web sites, from public records directories to Find-a-Grave.

Ten things every journalist should know in 2009

Michelle — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 01:40:25 +0000

10 things, with links to more information about those things. Examples:

2. How to use RSS feeds to gather news and manage them using filtering techniques (basic or advanced).

7. You do not have to own, or even host, the technology to innovate in journalism and engage your readers. There is a plethora of free or cheap tools available online, so there is no excuse for not experimenting with them.

10. Learn more about privacy. You can find a lot of information about people online, especially via social networking sites, but think carefully about the consequences. And bear in mind that it cuts both ways, if you do not do it carefully, your online research could compromise your sources.

And 7 more really useful things.