When you go to the front page you’ll have the options to search for topics within movies, or when actors said certain things, or for scenes that have something in particular in them. This is a heck of a lot more than just looking for a quote. I did a search for Barbara Stanwyck saying anything, since other clip engines I’ve looked at have not had a good selection of old movies. I got about 40 results. Results showed the name of the movie, a brief line of dialogue, and the actors involved. I was very impressed by the filters on the left side of the results page that let me narrow down the results by movie, by actor, and by director.

You will not get these filters when you do a search for something that gives you only a few results. I did a search for Rosalind Russell saying “Sold”, looking for the scene in His Girl Friday when she yammers back at Cary Grant and finishes with “Sold American!” Anyclip found it.

Search results vary depending on whether or not there’s a video available. In the case of this Russell clip, a window pops up with tabs to show both the video and the dialogue. If you’re registered with the site you can save the clip or rename it. Sometimes you’ll do a search and you’ll get a result that doesn’t have video yet. If you do a search for “raw beets and carrots” you’ll find that a) AnyClip doesn’t seem to like phrase searches — it ignores the quotes, and b) the result that has the quote, Ninotchka, will show a window with the correct line of dialogue, but a note that video isn’t available yet. Of course, Melvyn Douglas has some terrific lines in that movie, but he doesn’t appear in the filters for the search result. Doing just a search for his name does give a filter for that movie, so if you like you can look at that and see half-a-dozen exchanges or so and see the ones that AnyClip considered worth putting in for Melvyn Douglas.

If you don’t have anything to search for and you’d rather explore, try one of AnyClip’s themes, like “Spring Weather”, or speeches. I was impressed with the extent of the materials that were available on AnyClip, and I’m looking forward to the 5,000-movie version. One note: the SAI article noted bugginess and slow access speed for this site. I didn’t experience any of that.

There’s a “Market Mapper” that lets you look at a map of the US and see a variety of statistics about installations, average cost per watt, etc. But if you just want to see what’s going on in your neighborhood, you can do a zip code search and see what’s been installed in your area. The vast majority of installations in this database — over 51000 — are in California, so you might have to do a bit of searching if you don’t use a California zip code.

I did a search of 90210 and found 30 installations. Results are presented in a table that shows things like date of installation, cost per watt, and system cost, but if you click the little green button next to the result you’ll get a few more details like a map of the location, incentive amount, and county. If you want to do more extensive searches, go to the search page and you can search by kW size and/or date completed, in addition to location.

If you want to add some information of your own, visit the share page. You can get more information on the project at the news page (the project is also on Facebook and Twitter) and the FAQ.

That URL is actually a pointer to several different archives, from the Clarke Collection (“76 images, showing Dubliners in their city between 1897 and 1904,”) to the Lawrence Royal & Cabinet Collections (“19,331 images from a collection of commercially produced photographs taken between 1870 and 1914, showing topographical scenes throughout Ireland,”) to the Tempest Collection (“41 images, showing scenes from county Louth in the early part of the twentieth century.”)

Pick a collection and and you’ll get a gallery-type set of thumbnails with brief descriptions. Click a thumbnail and you’ll get a much larger version of the picture along with a few more details, including date, source, and rights.

I enjoyed exploring all the available images, especially as some of them are pretty weird. Occasionally I did wish for even larger images than what was available, but as these were photographs I had a bit of luck downloading them to my own computer, opening them in my graphics editor, and zooming in on them that way. A fun site to visit. Please note, though, that today being what it is, you might find that the site loads a bit slowly.

As I noted before, this is a labs item and you’ll find it at http://www.google.com/reader/play/. Google will give you a notice to get started, and once started you’ll get a slideshow of various items Google thought you’d find interesting. You don’t have to be logged in to a Google Account to use this app, but Google says “your experience will be personalized if you sign in.”

My personalized experience included what looked like an video turned into an animated gif. A fishing man was nudging his dog in the rump with his foot, apparently trying to get the dog to fall in the water. Karma being what it is, the man himself fell in. This was followed by images, charts, a couple of text-only stories, etc — going on and on and on. This is a self-progressing slideshow, but you can turn it off (as I did immediately.)

Each item has information about its source and a link to the original blog. There are also links to star, like, and share items — but sadly no way to “dislike” items, as there were some things that Google Reader recommended for me that I really didn’t want to see. I got around that by looking at the settings and changing the displayed items from “recommended” to the categories of business, news, and technology. There wasn’t as much multimedia with this selection, but on the other hand I didn’t have to watch anything that grossed me out.

I do not need a source of more interesting things to look at, thanks to 500+ RSS feeds in my feed reader, but this is an interesting idea. Definitely needs a dislike button, though.

The archive Web site is available at http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/. The site currently has more than 160,000 hours of footage dating back to 1987. C-SPAN actually started in 1979, but according to the NYT article much of the early broadcasts are not available. There are about 10,000 hours of footage available pre-1987 which, the article notes, will have to be formatted for the Web before it can go online.

The front page of the C-SPAN archives actually has many ways you can browse the video; you can look at the most recent video as well as the most shared and most e-mailed video in a variety of categories. There are a few articles, too, pointing to video content. But I always like to start with a nice simple keyword search. And I knew exactly what to search for.

Let me nerd out on you for a minute. I taped the Enron hearings. You remember Enron? The energy company that also generated massive amounts of bogus accounting? Yeah, them. They were the subject of Congressional Hearings in early 2002, so I did a search for that (maybe I can toss these tapes.)

The search results were divided up in several ways — as you can see from the screenshot I got results from people (Skilling, Lay, Watkins, etc.) and by program. You can sort programs by relevance, newest, or oldest. So while I did eventually find the Enron hearings, I also found Jeffrey Skilling testifying about electricity deregulation in 1997, and Ken Lay participating in a forum about energy regulatory issues in 1990. The individual pages for videos are nice — there’s an in-page player with links to embed the video on your own site if you like, and links for sharing on Facebook or Twitter. There’s also a list of related videos and of the people who are in the video.

Oh yes, people have their own pages as well, though sometimes the archiving is a little off (if you do a search for Yahoo you’ll get Jerry Yang in the list of people in Yahoo-related videos, but there’s also one appearance from that lesser known Yahoo co-founder, Jerry Young.)

Take Meg Whitman, former eBay CEO and current candidate for Governor of California.

Her page is at http://www.c-spanvideo.org/person/58256. Here’s you’ll find links to her latest appearances (and an RSS feed!), a list of people with whom she appears, a photo gallery, and a list of appearances by year. I wish they had a similar person gallery for companies — I would love an RSS feed of a specified company’s representatives appearing before Congress.

There were a couple of other disappointments with the video archives as well. Many of these videos are fairly long — an hour plus. Many of the videos I looked at did have transcripts with time stamps, so if you wanted to find something in the video you could go through the transcript, find it, and then pull the player slider to the appropriate timestamp. But I wish that appearances of people had been marked in some way so you could jump to different places in the video.

Overall, though, the video pages are nicely organized with a ton of information, the people pages have RSS feeds (RSS for search results — how cool would THAT be?), and the promise of more, older archives to come. I can’t decide who’s going to have more fun with this archive — Jon Stewart or The Gregory Brothers.

From the front page of the site you can choose to browse beryls, corundums, garnets, spinels, or tourmalines. Picking a category of stone will give you a list of specimens from that category; I’d say there were about fifty total. Each item listed has a brilliant picture, but to get details about it you have to click on the item number, which gives you the option to download a PDF file!

The PDF files I looked at were two pages with a description of the item, gemological properties, and photomicrograph data. (Today’s word, kids, is diaphaneity.)

I found the gem collection interesting but too-brief — I was left wanting to explore more data. In addition to this new Gem Project, the GIA also has a free archive of its Gems & Gemology publication, with the issues spanning 1934-1980. And if you’re looking for something a little less high-level, visit the page on grading diamonds and colored stones, or the visual resource library for educators.

That’ll give you 1655 results, from “The Veteran” to “Death of Reynolds — Gettysburg.” Each search result listed the date of the drawing and the artist; if you want to get fewer details but see thumbnails of the images click on the “Preview Images.”

Images have their own detail pages, which includes information about the medium of the drawing, any copyright restrictions, and additional notes. There’s a slightly larger version of the image as well. Click on that and you will not get an even larger image, but you will get the option to download archival quality versions of the images. Note: some of these images are pretty huge; the TIFF version of an 1864 snowball fight sketch I downloaded weighed in at over 125 MB.

If you’re looking for something specific, just add keywords to that initial “Morgan Collection” search — it’ll narrow down your results a lot. I added battle to the initial phrase and got 556 drawings.

Civil War history buffs, don’t miss it, especially if you liked the images from the Becker Collection. And don’t miss the links for the larger image downloads.

Recently O’Reilly Media launched a new portal for getting all the Ignite videos together in one place. Ignite Show Video, at http://igniteshow.com, currently has around 440 videos from past Ignite events but plenty more are to come.

I did a quick search for scrabble and to my surprise the video was not only there it was there twice; it looks like two people listed it (what from its description appears to be the same video was put up on January 29 and March 3.) I did another search, this time for Apple, and got five results — four videos (none duplicates) and one speaker bio. Search results include brief snippets about the video, the venue (though some are marked “anonymous”) and date and time. Each video has its own page with statistics on views and thumbs-up and thumbs-down counts, and with tools to share on Facebook or embed the video on your own Web site.

When I tried doing searches I was a little disappointed at how few results I got for some searches, so if you don’t find what you’re looking for you might want to try browsing the collection’s tags at http://igniteshow.com/browse/tags. (Be sure to do both, though; searching for Apple found four videos, but I found only one video with the Apple tag.) If you want to just get an idea of what kind of talks are available, you can browse the most popular videos or check out the latest.

If you’ve got five minutes and you’d like a little inspiration, check out this collection. Hey O’Reilly Media, how about a “random” function?

First: what’s “a limited time”? Don’t know. And what’s “the Census”? You can get to the census documents at http://go.footnote.com/census/?iid=642 but don’t expect to see everything here. At the moment the most complete censuses are the 1860 census (100%) and the 1930 census (98%), with partial availability from the 1900, 1910, and 1920 censuses (none of these three censuses are over 5% complete.)

Now, what is available is kind of interesting; Footnote believes in crowdsourcing of genealogy documents. Once you’ve found someone in the census and you’re looking at their listing (note you have to have a Footnote.com account to view census images, but they’re free) you can add things. You can add photos, stories, comments, or related documents. You can also post a particular person to Facebook, bookmark them, or “like” them.

Most of my experience exploring the US Census has been via Ancestry, and it does seem that Ancestry has more data. But I kind of like the way Footnote.com lets you explore the census. In comparing it to Ancestry.com’s census explorer, it presents a more manageable set of results in a way that seems to me easier to review. Most of my ancestors were kind enough to have names that are spelled about eight different ways, and Ancestry.com gets really enthused about the possibilities. Footnote.com is more restrained, and the way the search form is set up it’s very easy to swap out different spellings and narrow down search results.

If recent TV shows about genealogy have gotten interested in your ancestors, this free collection from Footnote is a good way to dip your toe in the water. If after this you want more, though, check out one of the many sites on the Web that point the way to genealogy data. Cyndi’s List, at http://www.cyndislist.com/, is one of my favorites.

So how do these scripts work? You can get the technical details at this blog post, but I’m just thinking macro. If you want to see ‘em at work open up a Google Spreadsheet, then choose Insert->Script. You’ll get a script gallery in a popup window.

Scripts are organized into several categories, including business, statistics, and personal finance. There’s also a “fun and games” section, because I know you’ve been longing for a “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” calculator. Actually just glancing through the scripts I found several things that’ll be useful, like the “Text to Columns” script (convert text to columns splitting on whitespace or a designated splitter — THANK YOU!) and a script that populates a spreadsheet with my Google Contacts.

When you add a new script, often you will get a new menu item on your spreadsheet (sometimes a new function becomes available instead.) When you enact the script for the frist time it’ll check to see if any permissions are necessary, and if there are you’ll get a giant warning box for which you have to give access permission. (Like the Google Apps Marketplace, I don’t know how much trust to give those scripts that have been already been vetted by Google, so these boxes leave me confused.) Once you’ve given permission, the use of the installed menu items is usually pretty straightforward.

I really liked some of the scripts I found, but I was surprised at some of the empty categories in the script directory. Further, I was left unsure by the giant warning screens coming before script permissions. Since I tend to create large, occasionally intricate spreadsheets, I will approach adding these scripts with caution.

If you’re interested in learning about creating scripts of your own, you can review the documentation at http://www.google.com/google-d-s/scripts/service_sites.html.