ResearchBuzz

Yahoo teams up with PayPal. About time.

Oxford University Press has a posse .. I mean a blog .

Mozilla fans, Thunderbird 2 is now available . But more important than that — at least to me — there’s now a Penelope extension available. It’s version Alpha 16, so don’t try unless you’re adventurous.

Gary Price on tour. Next time I see him I’m going to stick a lighter in his face and yell “FREEBIRD!”

DMOZ now has a subcategory for sitemaps at http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Search_Engines/Sitemaps/ .

Montana launches online access to driver and vehicle histories at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/070420/20070420005612.html?.v=1 .

Newswise has created A Guns and Violence channel in response to the Virginia Tech shootings.

New online museum of Scottish architecture.

I can’t think of anything else to call it. Whitepages.com has launched a new part of their site that allows you to enter a name and get a breakdown of how that name is represented across the United States. You can check it out at http://names.whitepages.com .

Enter a first and/or last name, and a state you want to search (you can also choose all states.) I did a search for John Doe in all states. And then I got a page full of John Doe information.

I got a table of where Doe is ranked in the phone book (6,161 of 6,843,982), where John is ranked (1 of 2,634,850) and the next rankings for first and last names. I got the ranking of the full name — 14,095 of 47,613,506 — which puts John Doe between John Emery and John Hendrickson in popularity.

Whitepages.com also has listings for the most popular states containing that name, and at the end of the page, a map of the US with states color-coded by how many people have that name. Lots of John Does in New York and Georgia, for some reason.

This will be a great tool for genealogists, and for the rest of us, a very weird timesink.

Catching up… Topix, one of my favorite news search engines that nobody talks about (though that’s getting less true every day) has launched “virtual news bureaus” for local folks to submit news. Topix is now available at http://www.topix.com .

When you first go to the site you’ll be offered local news from your area (if Topix can figure it out from your connection.) You also have the option to search for an area by city or zip code. I went to good old 90210.

The Beverly Hills Page is laid out like a blog with recent news stories. Often a human will be editing the stories, but in the case of Beverly Hills it’s up to RoboBlogger. Tabs, which do not look like tabs, at the top of the screen also provide access to Beverly Hills forums, wire service stories, and classified ads.

I wanted to see page edited by humans instead of robobloggers so I tried The NYC page, which is indeed edited by humans. Two of ‘em. The news page was filled with everything from stories on Earth Day to commercial real estate to local crime stories. The forums were equally diverse in their discussions (very lively forums), as were the wire stories.

If you’re a longtime user of Topix you might be missing the ability to search the entire database, as now the site looks very news-focused. You can still do it: go to the Wire page of a locality and look for a news search form on the right. You’ll be able to search news, blogs, or both, restrict your search to certain countries or sources, and so on. I like the local offerings, but I think I’ll be going back to Topix’ standard search more often.