ResearchBuzz

Now this is an interesting idea. The Ageless Project, at http://jenett.org/ageless/, lists blogs by the birth years of their authors. As you might expect the majority of blogs listed are by bloggers born in the 1970s, but the directory lists bloggers born as early as 1911 to those born as late as 1988.

The site’s simple. You can do a keyword search or you can browse by decade of birth. (There are so many blogs from the 1970s that you can optionally browse that decade one half at a time.) The 1911 blogger unfortunately does not write in English, but the gentleman who was born in 1913 and writes Don to Earth does some really nice stuff. Blogs are listed with a screen thumbnail, name, year of birth, and name of blogs. Blogs open in a new window. I would really like more description than is provided but to be fair most of these are personal journals with not much in the line of specialty. (Though “My Mom’s Blog” has a recipe for a pie that includes ketchup. I’m going to have to make that for my husband.)

I’m surprised how many people from the 20s and 30s are blogging — awesome! To get an idea of how the site breaks out across ages, visit the stats page. There are a total of about just over 1700 blogs listed here. The site includes information on how to submit a site, but there are several restrictions (mostly concerning amount and type of advertising on sites.) A fun browse!

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

Google has announced some new features at its Google Finance property, available at http://finance.google.com/ . As you might expect, Google Finance allows you track stocks, get business information, etc. It’s in beta, as usual.

And watch videos. One of the improvements announced for Google Finance is the addition of finance-related videos, including content from CBS, Forbes, and First Business. There are just a few at the bottom of the page, and then you’re prompted to link directly to Google Video for a search for Finance. (Did I miss that Google Video is now providing RSS feeds for search results? Look to the right of the search results count.)

Google Finance has also extended its stock charts. Stocks now show prices from extended hour markets. You have to set that, though, when you’re looking at a chart — it’s not a default view. Charts run from one-day view to one-year view.

The third item was the ability to drag-and-drop portfolio stocks to put them in an order other than alphabetical, but I couldn’t get that to work. I even tried it on the Google homepage.

Despite that third item I really like Google Finance; I hadn’t spent a whole lot of time with it. I like the autocompletion of stock symbols, the integration of news points onto charts, the detailed news listings, the instant refresh of charts, the uncluttered interface. Going to spend more time over here!

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

Many years ago there was a band called Transvision Vamp. And they did a song called Trash City. (”motivation for the spacin’ generation.”) And now every time I see the name of the Ask’ mega-business-local-searcha thing, AskCity, I hear the song Trash City. But that’s okay because the new tools Ask is offering for AskCity means I don’t mind hearing TV in my head instead of The Bell Rays.

AskCity, at http://city.ask.com/city , is a map application that allows you to search for local businesses, events, and movies. Just enter a keyword and a timespan. Make sure that you’re zoomed to the area that you want to search, because AskCity won’t search the entire US by default. I found just searching for city names did the most good.

Once you’ve found something of interest, then you’ll get to use those nifty drawing tools that Ask recently announced. You can draw shapes on the map which overlay their coverage area with a very slight shade — useful for pointing things out. However you can also search within the shapes you’ve drawn. You can search within an area covering several states or draw a straight line and search only a street. There’s also a freehand drawing tool and a tool for adding text.

You can put multiple shapes/lines on a map and search within each. And the shapes show up on the map view or on the aerial view. At certain levels you can take screen shots of the map and save them on the map page. (This worked well when I was at city level, but when I zoomed out pretty far and tried to take a screen shot Firefox almost crashed.)

Of course Ask has wrapped all this up with the ability to set permalinks or e-mail address information to friends. Very cool. The next time I have to generate a map or do some very narrow-level searching, this is where I’m going first.