ResearchBuzz

The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL) has announced adding a multimedia collection to their archive.

The LTDL already holds more than seven million tobacco industry documents that relate to sales, advertising, etc. The new multimedia items include corporate meeting tapes, focus groups, hearings, and commercials.

The collection itself is available at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/index.html. However to get to the multimedia you probably want to start at the search page. Here you’ll have an option to choose what you want to search; eliminate everything except the multimedia.

I did a search for focus. I got 131 results. Results listed descriptions of the items (lots and lots of focus groups), company, subject keyword, access information, etc. None of these results, I found, were available online. However when I did a search for Marlboro I found that some of the search results had an additional link: “View Now at: Internet Archive”. That link takes you to a standard Archive.com page which includes a link for streaming the multimedia. LTDL documents available this way include over 45 minutes of Marlboro commercials from 1956-1957 (in one collection), Camel commercials, and congressional hearings from the 80s and 90s.

If you not only want to buy an airline ticket but try to figure out when that ticket might be cheaper or more expensive, check out the new beta of Farecast, available at Farecast.com. The beta is so limited that this is mostly a technology showcase, but it’s an interesting technology showcase.

The limitations: outbound markets are limited to Seattle and Boston. Only roundtrip airfares are available. Sometimes lowest airfares are missed and there are some browser incompatibility issues. You can get a complete listing of the beta limitations here; note these limitations are all being worked on.

The front page has a query box for a trip leaving Boston/Seattle and going several places around the US, you also specify date and the number of people on the trip (a flexible search allows you to compare fares over a 30-day period.) I created a flight from Boston to Buffalo, leaving 7/14 and coming back 7/20.

Farecast thought about it for a minute and came back with a chart predicting that the lowest fare would rise an average of $36 over the next 7 days. Farecast was 78% confident of this prediction. There was also a chart available showing the average ticket prices for this fare over the last couple of months. (Run your mouse over the points of the chart to get prices and dates for those prices.)

Beneath that is a pretty standard fare listing showing low prices, airline, times of departure, etc. A filter system on the left allows you to narrow down the results several different ways — time of departure, airlines, number of stops, price range, etc. (There’s a grid listing tab at the top of the search results page if you’d rather look at the results that way.) Click on the name of the airline/fare provider to go straight to their site.

It’s interesting; I know airfares go up and down, but every single scenario I looked at the fares were going up. Sometimes they were only going up a little bit, but they were going up. You can get some overview of how Farecast is doing its predictions at http://www.farecast.com/about/ourTechnology.jsp.

Due to the extreme limitations of the beta, this isn’t really useful for ticket shopping, but the prediction technology is interesting. It would be useful to either have a third-party watching the success of their predictions over time, or perhaps a place on their site that keeps tabs on their own “track record.”

I thought I’d covered this in ResearchBuzz, but apparently I hadn’t, so there’s no time like the present… Podbop, at http://podbop.org/, allows you to search for musical acts playing in your area, and get links to songs by those acts at the same time. The site says it lists over 2700 artists and over 4200 songs.

The front page asks you to specify a city and state. I chose Indianapolis IN. I got a list of bands playing in the area over the next few weeks, including Moe, Nickelback, and Adrian Belew. With each listing (they include time, date, venue, etc and a link to more details at Eventful) there are also links to songs and song samples from that band.

All of the songs I saw were MP3s; I don’t think anything else is indexed. The songs themselves came from everywhere; I saw things from Archive.org, from record label sites, from the artist’s personal site, and from some places I couldn’t identify at all.

You can get the search results as a podcast; look for the giant icon at the top of the results. You can also get the results as an M3U audio playlist. Nice!

There’s a list of artists and songs at http://podbop.org/artists/. Visitors are invited to check the list and add other artists if they’re not already on the site. A great idea, well-executed.