21st February 2007, 11:23 pm
Thursday marks ResearchBuzz’ 400th issue. The Web site that became ResearchBuzz started in April 1998, with the newsletter starting in October 1998. 400 issues! Almost nine years! I’m pretty amazed.
To celebrate, I’ve made several upgrades and changes to the site.
1) Full-text RSS feeds — I’ve always been pretty resistant to full-text feeds because even without them, I’ve had problems with my content being grabbed by scrapers and reproduced without attribution or permission. But I’m trying them now in the hope that reader happiness outweighs scraper naughtiness. (I’ve also done a couple of other little site things, like upgrading WP and finally fixing the domain so the landing page is actually www.researchbuzz.org/wp .)
2) Massive Kebberfegg update — As you might remember, Kebberfegg ( Kebberfegg.com ) is a tool to generate keyword-based RSS feed without having to run around to a bunch of search engines. It launched in October 2005. I have updated it now so that it generates over 55 feeds in eleven different categories. Of course it’s still free to use, and a very fast way to generate LOTS of keyword-based feeds!
3) New Search Engine — SearchOfficialBlogs.com — Last June, I mused about an official corporate blog filter. With the advent of the Google Custom Search Engine I figured it would be a good time to try to build one. SearchOfficialBlogs.com searches over 140 different official blogs — from politicians, celebrities, musicians, companies, institutions, etc.
4) New Search Engine — JustAskAnybody.com — 100 Ask-An-Expert and advice sites and pages, all gathered together via Google Custom Search Engine in one giant search engine of massive expertise. Get lots of answers with a simple search at JustAskAnybody.com .
5) More virtuality — More developing and planning is going on in Second Life (virtual classes in information trapping are being mapped out), and I think I’ll be moving soon from my current location to a larger site with more prims and some serious mad scientist-ing. Visiting ResearchBuzzSL.com will take you to a slurl.com map of the current digs. More details on the way.
Everybody, thanks so much for reading and supporting ResearchBuzz. You’re awesome.
21st February 2007, 02:30 am
Genealogy site Ancestry.com has announced a huge new collection of African-American family history records, though compared to the passenger list collection it’s being positively chintzy with the free access (sign up for a free account and get three days free access, as opposed to “free access until the end of November”.)
This collection includes more than 55 million African-American family history records includes US Colored Troops service records, Freedmen’s Bureau records, and narratives from 3,500 former slaves. (Southern Claims Commission records are on the way.) The US Federal Census collection, which spans 1790-1930, has been upgraded to users can search for African-American entries (there are 53 million of them in the census.)
To get more information, visit the collection directly at http://www.ancestry.com/aahistory .
This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .
19th February 2007, 11:42 pm
Oh boy. I love graph-generating Web toys. And hey, I could even do some traffic comparison with this thing. Alexaholic, at http://www.alexaholic.com/ , allows you to do traffic comparison and more of up to five different domains and get the data in graph form.
From the front page enter the domain whose traffic you want to compare. I entered wii.com , playstation.com, and xbox.com. The first graph I got showed me the reach, in millions, of the compared Web sites over the last year, in graph format. Bear in mind that if you compare domains that are very very different in traffic, the graph may not be very useful. So if you compared, say, yahoo.com, google.com, and WRAL.com, WRAL is not going to show up on the graph except as a line on the bottom of the graph — the traffic is too low in comparison to the other two sites.
Additional tabs give you access to more graphs, including daily traffic rank and page views. Another set of tabs allows you to narrow your focus to the last seven days or expand it to the last five years. A third set of tabs lets you control the smoothness of the graph curves. Finally there’s a button to let you get a permalink to the graph you generated.
Alexaholic offers code that enables you to embed its charts on your own site. There’s also a huge list — Seth Godin’s Web 2.0 Traffic Watch List — that shows you current traffic rank and movement for over 900 Web 2.0 sites. I’m not sure why some of these sites were considered Web 2.0 — Feedster? Icerocket? — but it’s still a pretty interesting list of sites if you remove the 2.0 label.
Very cool. I could spend a lot of time here, making graphs.
This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .
