I noticed an article in Silicon Alley Insider about a new movie search engine that lets you look up clips. I’ve been seeing a lot of these lately, so I wasn’t surprised to see another one. I was wondering what would make this one stand out. Though it doesn’t have an overwhelming number of movies [...]

Thanks to Laboratory Equipment for the heads up. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has a new “community driven” Web site showing photovoltaic installations across the US. Open PV has over 67,000 installations catalogued. (Well, newish — it started accepting data in November.) You can access it at http://openpv.nrel.gov/. There’s a “Market Mapper” that lets you [...]

Just in time for Saint Patrick’s Day! Independent.ie had a story yesterday morning about an expanded archive from the National Library of Ireland. This site contains 34,000 photographs of Ireland covering 1860 to 1954, and is available at http://digital.nli.ie/cdm4/index_glassplates.php?CISOROOT=/glassplates. That URL is actually a pointer to several different archives, from the Clarke Collection [...]

Google had some pretty busy labs last week! Aside from things like the new features for the Google Calendar, Google also announced Google Play, a tool that allows you to explore Google Reader items a little more visually. As I noted before, this is a labs item and you’ll find it at http://www.google.com/reader/play/. Google will [...]

What a great thing to read in the New York Times this morning! C-SPAN as you may know stands for Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, and is a set of networks that broadcasts nothing but government proceedings and public affairs programming. Now this network has taken “virtually every minute” (according to the New York Times article) [...]

I will not give in to the easy puns! But I will give in to the urge to stare at shiny rocks. Soooo shiny… the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) has launched The Gem Project, available at http://www.gia.edu/research-resources/gia-gem-database/. This site is based on the data from the Edward J. Gübelin collection of gemstones and it’s [...]

I got a treat last week when I read a little blurb in the Library of Congress blog about the recently digitized Morgan Collection of Civil War Drawings. This set contains more than 1,600 eyewitness sketches made during the US Civil War. I don’t have a direct URL for you, but go to http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/mdbquery.html and [...]

I have been a fan of the Ignite events ever since I saw the Ignite talk about fighting dirty at Scrabble. A focused topic, an enthusiastic speaker, a couple handfuls of slides, and five minutes, and you’ve got some fascinating presentations. Recently O’Reilly Media launched a new portal for getting all the Ignite videos together [...]

Footnote.com, my favorite genealogy Web site that periodically gives terrific levels of free access, has announced that it’s making access to its US census documents available for “a limited time.” 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 [...]

I have a love/hate relationship with Google Spreadsheets. On the one hand, I love how easy it is to integrate Web data into spreadsheets, and how easy it is to share and collaborate with others. On the other hand, the limitations for integrating data and spreadsheet sizes drive me banonkers. Score one for Google, though [...]

Late last month, the White House announced that it had reached a milestone of over 150,000 visitor records released. This milestone followed what you might call the initial milestone, the September announcement that these visitor records would be released in the first place. You can see the records at http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/disclosures/visitor-records. The records are presented in [...]

I read several government blogs and aside from this head cold have spent very little time recently under a rock. Therefore I know that the 2010 census forms will be mailed this month. Despite all the TV commercials and the Web hype, the US government wants to make AB-SO-LUTE-LY sure; I got a letter today [...]

The Harvard School of Public Health has released a new site called The Firearms Research Digest. The site has six years’ (2003-2008) worth of summarized research from social science, medical, criminology, and public health journals. It’s available at http://www.firearmsresearch.org/. The site will eventually be expanded to include research from 1988 to the present. You can [...]

It’s time once again for large amounts of data, sliced and diced thin! Google announced on Monday the new Google Labs project, Google Public Data Explorer. You can check it out at http://www.google.com/publicdata/home with the available data sets to explore at http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory. The front page of the Public Data Explorer had birth rates and life [...]

Hey, iPhone users don’t get to have all the fun. Google last night announced a new site, Google Apps Marketplace, that will sell (and in some cases give away) applications that will extend the functionality of Google Apps themselves. Google Apps, in case you’ve never used it, is a suite of Google applications (like email, [...]

No, Yahoo Answers is not Google Answers (RIP Google Answers, you died far too soon.) But it’s still an interesting place to visit when you’ve got an odd or, in my experience, a less-technical question. I also find it a good place to go when I’m first learning about a topic and need to pick [...]

It’s March, which around here means March Madness, which means people discussing basketball everywhere you go and much surreptitious watching of television and listening to the radio (though nowadays it’s more checking a certain tab on your browser and checking your iPhone.) If you like the NCAA Baskeball Tourney, don’t mind limiting your interest to [...]

Last week I had a terrible cold. So when I read about this new exhibit from the National Library of Medicine, I knew I had to write about it. (GAHCHOO!) Sorry. The new exhibit is An Iconography of Contagion: A Web Exhibition of 20th-century Health Posters, and it’s available at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/iconographyofcontagion/index.html. This exhibit is adapted [...]

I read an article in Wired last week that made me very happy: Popular Science is now online as entire archive, and it’s free! The magazine has teamed up with Google Books to make its archive available. To search, you can start at http://www.popsci.com/archives, but I found the page a little narrow to go through the [...]

Good news for folks with hearing impairments and folks who don’t have hearing impairments but sometimes just can’t figure out what other people are saying (that would be me.) YouTube announced last week that YouTube videos (at least those in English which have voices clearly speaking and aren’t drowned out or muffled by background noises, [...]

I hate bookmarks. I really do. I always find way more things to bookmark than I can possibly keep organized. And though I will bookmark things (you kind of have to after a while) I despair out of getting any proper use out of what I’ve saved. Google, last week, announced a compromise between creating [...]

I think I was about five years off. Several years ago I was thinking about the potential for location-based searching, and I thought it would be a big deal Real Soon Now. But it’s only really taken off in the last couple of years, and it’s only now that Google’s overtly introducing it into the [...]

Oh, New York Times, how you irritate me with your constant talk of a paywall (I don’t care if you institute it, I’m just tired of hearing the endless coy reveal and discussion. Paywall or get off the pot.) But no matter how much the NYT gets on my nerves, I always forgive it [...]

Rafe Needleman had an article on CNET about a new search engine, Buzzzy (note the three z’s), which searches Google Buzz. But it searches other sources, too, and divides them out in interesting ways. Buzzzy lives at http://buzzzy.com/ with a simple keyword search on its front page. I did a search for Toyota. You might notice [...]

Thanks to Creative Commons for the heads-up about Peer 2 Peer University, which has announced its second round of free and open online courses. Read this and sign up quick, because the registration deadline is February 28… What the heck is P2PU? The tagline for the site is “Learning for everyone, by everyone, about almost anything,” [...]

Yahoo! and Twitter have recently announced a partnership. (See Yahoo’s announcement here) and Twitter’s announcement here.) Twitter notes that Yahoo will be getting the “firehose” — the full feed of public tweets. Since Twitter users post 600 Tweets per second that’s a huge amount of data. And judging from the Twitter growth curve, I think [...]

CBC News has noted a new site from Hot Docs, which it describes as “the largest documentary festival in North America.” The new Hot Docs site has well over 150 documentaries from Canadian filmmakers (along with some other content) and it’s all available online for free. The site is available at http://hotdocslibrary.ca/en/ (that’s the English, [...]

If you watch commercials on American TV you know what kgb is. The company’s commercials are weird enough that they kind of burn into the brain. If you’ve missed it, here’s a quick overview: kgb is a text answer service. Text a question to 542542 and get an answer. Of course, the answer costs you [...]

What is it with all the beer sites I’ve been finding lately? I don’t even drink beer. Maybe one day I’ll find a site that covers Craft Root Beer. Anyway, the Brewers Association has put together a Web site to highlight a great deal of information about Craft Beer. It’s called Craft Beer, strangely enough, [...]

Michael Fagan, ex-Microsoft guy and all around Nice Young Man, has revamped and re-released a tool he developed quite a while ago. Quizify, at http://quizify.com/, allows you to either enter a term list or link to a list of terms, then get a flashcard-type quiz that tests you on those terms. The site has several [...]

Are you interested in the history of New York? You might want to check out a new site which is a collaborative project between nine Reference and Research Library Resources Councils in New York State. The site is called New York Heritage and it’s available at http://www.newyorkheritage.org. The site contains information from over 160 collections [...]

A couple weeks ago I covered Google’s new feature that allows you to monitor pages even when they don’t have RSS feeds. A few days ago reader LP e-mailed me and asked about the new feature, “Did it work?” And I realized I had completely forgotten to write a follow-up post. So yeah, about Google [...]

I have mentioned before the Internet Archive and its wonderful collection of free live music. Now you can bring some of that music to your own site with a new Live Music Widget, as announced by the Internet Archive last week. The widget is available on Widgetbox at http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/internet-archive-free-music. You can do some customizing [...]

Hat tip to ResourceShelf to the pointer about a new resource from the National Library of Australia — the ability to search about 18,500 images from the Library’s collection by color. You can try it yourself at http://ll04.nla.gov.au/ . It’s pretty simple; pick a color from the color grid on the left. (There’s a menu [...]

Last week, the College of the Holy Cross launched a new 3D online database of birds. Extant, recently extinct, and fossil birds. This new Web site is called the Aves 3D Web site and is available at http://aves3d.org. This site contains about 200 three-dimensional models of bird bones from 98 different species. The models were [...]

Google announced on Friday that it had acquired Aardvark, a “unique technology company that lets you quickly and easily tap into the knowledge and experience of your friends and extended network of contacts.” Social Q&A? Anyway, once Aardvark was bought it was put into Google Labs, hopefully with comfortable quarters and hay or gingersnaps or [...]

Google announced last Friday that Google Maps would be getting its own Lab! Google Labs, as you might know, is a place where Google puts niche or in-testing features that users can try if they want to. You can get to the new Google Maps Lab by going to Google Maps and clicking on the [...]

Duke Library noted last Friday a new addition to its AdViews digital archive. AdViews, is an online archive for old commercials. The bulk of it is only viewable through iTunes (sigh) though you can do a search. The new addition to AdViews includes over 1,800 commercials and a couple of interviews about advertising. That brings to [...]

Does anyone know what Philipp Lenssen eats for breakfast? I want some. Dude has unending energy — he’s always coming up with new and interesting Web archives and sites. His newest tool sounds so basic when you see the URL, but then you start digging into it… His latest is called What Happened in My Birth [...]

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or, okay, under a few feet of snow — stay warm DC area!) you will have heard about the launch of Google Buzz. It actually launched a few days ago but has only within the last day or so been set up for all GMail accounts. Do you [...]

Hey! This looks pretty handy. The Open Educational Resources Center for California has a pretty unusual URL — http://grou.ps/oercenter/ — but a nice collection of resources that goes into open source education and a little beyond. The front of this site has a great left nav that leads you to seven different resources for finding [...]

Despite the fact that I’m not fond of Guinness, I suspect I will be be coming back to the Irish Beer Finder, available at http://www.irishbeerfinder.com/. Why? Because in addition to finding Irish bars, the site also lists information about Irish music. The site lists 2,400 Irish bars and taverns in all 50 states. From the front [...]

On Friday the Trust for Public Land (TPL) announced the launch of a new land conservation database, available at http://www.conservationalmanac.org/. The site has had information available on conservation before, but is now offering parcel-level data and mapping features. The new features are currently available for Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, and Oregon. This morning Alaska, Arizona, [...]

Footnote.com has announced a new addition to its Vietnam War Collection: Army Photos and Unit Service Awards. As you may know Footnote.com is usually a subscription service but the company is making its Vietnam War collection free for the month of February. You can access it at http://go.footnote.com/vietnam/. The Army Photos are directly available at [...]

Bing announced last week several initiatives that will tie it in tighter with Facebook. Facebook recently had its sixth anniversary, which is pretty old in Internet terms, but has gotten really hot in the last couple of years. Bing is the search provider on Facebook. In other words, when you run a search on Facebook [...]

I thought the Internet was the Internet, but you can also consider the Internet as “the Cloud”. And there’s a lot going on in “the Cloud,” from applications to hosting to content delivery systems. Several companies provide products and services to the Cloud, and Cloudbook has a directory of over 1200 of them. (If, like [...]

After my writeup about Calendar Labs last week, I got a note from reader MF about Sunrise Sunset Calendars, available at http://www.sunrisesunset.com/. This site has apparently been around for years and years, but either I hadn’t heard about it before or I’d heard about it and forgotten. The site allows you to create your own [...]

A hat tip and block of suet to Zen Birdfeeder, which tipped me off to the new release from the New York State Ornithological Association. The NYSOA has released its quarterly journal, The Kingbird, as a free searchable archive. The current archive contains 228 issues that span from 1950-2007 — that’s about 8 million words [...]

The Harvard Law School Library announced earlier this week the release of the Maurice Ettinghausen collection of Ruhleben civilian internment camp papers, 1914-1937. An overview of the collection is available at http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/deepLink?_collection=oasis&uniqueId=law00029. The papers were produced when the German government established an internment camp at a horse racetrack outside of Berlin to incarcerate male foreign [...]

Sunmee Huh took a Google Custom Search engine and tweaked it to make it more ergonomic for older users and a little less confusing to novice searchers. The result is called Good50 and it’s available at http://www.good50.com. While it’s not quite perfect — some of the functionality doesn’t work for me — it’s a good [...]